Realis: Nextlander Preview
Transcriber: Daneran
Introduction        1
Character introductions [00:03:35]        4
[00:15:00]        17
Scene setting & Story beginning [00:29:21]        29
[00:30:00]        30
Start of the action [00:39:24]        37
[00:45:05]        42
[01:00:00]        56
[01:15:01]        70
[01:45:02]        100
[02:00:07]        114
[02:15:01]        128
[02:30:00]        145
[02:45:00]        163
[03:00:00]        178
[03:15:00]        195
End of the story [03:29:59]        211
[03:30:00]        211
Introduction
Vinny Caravella: Hello everybody, and welcome to this very special Friday! Let's make sure everybody can hear and see us! I have too many windows open over here…!
Austin Walker: [chuckles]
Vinny: …so I'm just gonna… if you can hear and see… I'd appreciate it. Austin Walker, I'm gonna introduce you first!
Austin: Hello.
Vinny: Hello. I'm not gonna leave you hanging here because you're going to be talking probably…
Austin: [sighs]
Vinny: …for the majority of this next thing. Though…
Austin: [overlapping] We don’t know! Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] We'll explain why! Yeah, I mean…
Alex Navarro: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] You never know. Brad Shoemaker…
Brad Shoemaker: [overlapping] Greetings.
Vinny: [overlapping] Alex Navarro, welcome to this very special… Friday.
Alex: Welcome to the Moon hoppin’.
Austin: [chuckles]
Vinny: [laughs] Austin, we are here to play Realis.
Austin: We are. [overlapping] Uh, Realis…
Vinny: [overlapping] You're pretty familiar with this game, right?
Austin: Yeah. Yeah, I've… I've been thinking about it [chuckles] for a few years now.
Alex: [chuckles]
Austin: Realis is a tabletop RPG that I just released — in what's called an Ashan form. Which is… it's sort of like Early Access in video games. Except… There isn't the expectation of, like, constant updates. It's kind of like: “Here's a big preview build. Then I'll be back in a year with the rest of it.” You know what I mean? Um. Realis is a diceless RPG of — like you said — moon hopping adventure. The tone and kind of aesthetic of it can blend anything from… you know, kind of… swashbuckling space piratery adventures to… Berserk-inspired… dark… metal… [overlapping] you know, space adventures.
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: We were pretty much always in space… That's not always true! I ran one game that's, like, entirely on a single Moon. And it's kind of like a medieval Moon. And so, that one may as well just been a pretty traditional fantasy game, except sometimes spaceships and space elevators showed up. Um. It is a diceless game which I think will be the first… Maybe we ran one other thing that was diceless, once — back on in the Giant Beast days. But… It's a diceless game. But it still kind of has some a little bit of crunch to it, a little bit of tactical thinking.
The core of the game is that players and their player characters have a set of four Sentences that make up what their skills are. If you’ve played something like Fate, it's a little bit like Aspects. Um… So, for instance, you might have… I mentioned Berserk already. One of the first classes in the book — at least right now — is the Berserker. The Berserker has four Sentences. Those Sentences are: “I always kill my foe; I always carry an unstoppable weapon; I always learn through violence; and I always hurt those close to me.”
As you play, and as you fail, those Sentences slowly become what's called more real. They become more Realized. They go from these big archetypal… broad… painting with the broad-brush style ideas about the character and they get both more powerful and more limited. These start as all +0 Sentences but, eventually, they become, like, +1, +2, +3 Sentences. And each time they get one of those pluses, they get a little added modifier or qualifier that reduces the breadth at which they could be used.
So Guts starts Berserk with “I always kill my foe” but by the time we get to, like, where… where it is now in in that comic — RIP to Kentaro Miura — it's, like: “I always kill my foe when my friends are in threat and I'm the only one who can take the necessary action.” Or something like that. Which Means that, in that scenario, Guts doesn't get to just jump someone in the street using “I always kill my foe” anymore. The beginning of the game he could just kill whoever he wants, whenever he wants. No problem. But because he's been chipped away at like a sculpture eventually he becomes a different version of who he is.
Character introductions [00:03:35]
Austin: Today we're going to be playing with some characters that already have some Sentences Realized. We're not coming in with, like, a fresh campaign zero… everyone's at +0, because I wanted to show off some of that stuff. Uh… Do y'all want to take us through some of your characters — in this Moon hopping death metal adventure?
Vinny: [overlapping] Hell yeah!
Alex: [overlapping] Absolutely.
Vinny: [overlapping] Who should go first?
Alex: [overlapping] Who wants to start?
Vinny: Yeah. I can go first! [overlapping] I'm very excited!
Austin: [overlapping] You go… You should go first.
Alex: [overlapping] You should go first. You should go first.
Vinny: [overlapping] I should say I'm super excited to play this… book.
Austin: [overlapping] Thank you.
Vinny: I… I read through it. Austin, it was awesome. [chuckles] Like, much more… I was expecting a lot! But this is much more… Realized…
Austin: Thank you.
Vinny: …than even I was expecting it. It feels like you have thought about this quite a bit.
Austin: [chuckles] Yeah.
Vinny: All right. Um… Let's take it over to our sheets here… Hold on a second here.
Austin: [overlapping] Vinny, I think there’s something special with your sheet.
Alex: [overlapping] We gave a couple of pages to jump between.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: Yeah. But go ahead and go over to your sheet first.
Vinny: Okay. Yes.
Alex: There we go.
Vinny: Selex Clavitron.
Austin: So Selex, not Selix. Selex.
Vinny: Selex.
Austin: Okay.
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Vinny: [overlapping] ‘Cause it’s…
Alex: [overlapping] Like Felix.
Vinny: Like Felix! Because I was thinking, like a… like a repairman. And then I had to make it fantasy. So Selex.
Austin: Yup.
Alex: Yeah.
Vinny: Selex Clavitron is a Goodfisher. Austin, do you kind of want to explain what the…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah…
Vinny: [overlapping] …archetype Goodfisher is?
Austin: A Goodfisher is like a regular guy. You know? This is a… Now, here's a real Austin Walker special.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Goodfisher is like the slang term they use in the first town of Dragon's Dogma.
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: To refer to you. It's like cousin. You know?
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh-huh.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] It's like: “oh what's good with you today, goodfisher?”
Vinny: Ooohhh…!
Austin: And it's just, like, an average laborer, an average guy, an average person — who's, like, getting through the day. I think, thematically, it's sort of the fish out of water when a regular person gets wrapped up in something bigger than themselves. And so the Sentences begin with stuff like: “I always put it in an honest day's work” — which you have Realized in a very funny way.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Which I love. And then, like, there's always the fourth Sentence on every Class is always something that feels like it kind of bite you in the ass — a little bit, but on purpose. There's a couple of mechanics in the game where you want to fail. Either because… failing lets you mark a Sentence — which is what lets you rank it up eventually, and lets you Realize it —, but also sometimes you want your Token back and one way that you can get your Token back is by using a Sentence to get you into trouble. And so yours is: “I always struggle against ❧my roots.☙” 
The reason “my roots” is in those kind of florons — those, like, leaf symbols — is because certain classes have what are called Hallmark Sentences that… they have a little bit extra… that the player fleshes out. Because, otherwise, they it's just like… a +0 Sentence is the thing it is. But things like “I always struggle against ❧my roots.☙” or “I always carry an unstoppable ❧weapon☙”, the unstoppable weapon is also in those sorts of florons. Because it's, like: “hey, define what that is for me.”
Vinny: [overlapping] Hm.
Austin: [overlapping] What is your unstoppable weapon? In this case, what are… I mean, I guess you gave me what Selex's roots are. And it's this little backstory… [chuckles] 
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] …that I've had to reduce down to a size 5 font…
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: …to fit into the Backstory…
Vinny: Uh-huh.
Austin: …section here. Also, really quick: I want to shout out… two people who made these sheets. I did not make this version of the sheets. Takuma Okada and Brendan McLeod, who are both incredible tabletop designers in their own rights, made these sheets. They are also playtesters on the game — for the last couple of years. And shout outs to them. But anyway! Vinny, if you go back over to your sheet…
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: …and then scroll all the way over to the right…!
Vinny: Uh-huh.
Austin: …you can see I added an extra-large [overlapping] backstory section.
Alex: [overlapping] Very nice.
Vinny: [overlapping] I do see. You can't see it in the thing here
Austin: [overlapping] Just for you…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah. I can see it.
Austin: Could you just summarize… what your backstory is, what your deal is?
Vinny: Sure. Yeah, yeah. My… Generally, Selex works on a planet where like a… a kind of lower middle-class, the lower-class, kind of just scraping by day-to-day are at the mercy of giant corporations and criminal syndicates that run everything, in this kind of derelict or older…
Austin: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …self-contained city-state. Where things are just breaking constantly. Oxygen scrubbers — you know, the whole thing. There’s… water’s falling apart. And Selex just gets by kind of tinkering, engineering, fixing. Everyday handyman, keepin’ everything up and running. Feels like it is a very honest way to keep everybody going. It's kind of… a little chipper! Uh… Feels pretty good. And then, one day… Felix… Or, Selex fell in love.
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Vinny: And it turned out that the woman he fell in love with was actually hiding from a… was part of a criminal Syndicate and was trying to lay low. They had a kid together. He didn't know this until she vanished after, basically, the heat was off. Went… disappeared. He raised his daughter. Then around 16 — [chuckles] I think I put there? — the wife came back, now the head of this criminal organization. And recruited their now prodigy daughter — who actually has this knack for getting into all sorts of systems pretty easily — and then she disappeared. And Selex’s dream is to just see his daughter one more time. Before he dies. And make it right.
Austin: Love it. Fantastic.
Vinny: Make right.
Austin: Uh. All right. Let's move over… Let's move over one sheet to Brad, maybe.
Brad: [overlapping] All right.
Austin: [overlapping] Let's see if you have any questions… I guess, one more thing on the sheets. Let's go back… We can do it here, actually. Let's start with the Impulse on your character… I guess, what's your character's name, Brad? [chuckles]
Brad: Floog’artha.
Austin: [overlapping] Floog’artha
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: You're playing a Witch.
Brad: Mm-hm.
 Austin: Are you… Is Floog’artha a… he/him witch, or… [overlapping] Okay. In this world…
Brad: [overlapping] Yes. Yeah.. For sure.
Austin: [overlapping] Okay.
Brad: [overlapping] I considered making… I sort of considered making even that indeterminate. But… [chuckles]
Austin: Yeah! You know, that's absolutely fine…!
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah!
Austin: [overlapping] You know. Listen. Witches movin’ in all sorts of ways.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Uh… Every Class has an Impulse — this is another feature of the Class, on top of things like its Sentences. And… that includes, for the witch, the Impulse: “respond to an urgent problem with a ritualistic Means.”
Brad: Mm-hm.
Austin: You see Means is capitalized. Means are anything that you can use to… use in a Conflict. A Conflict is, like, where you would normally roll dice in a game, we just call that a Conflict. And so those are your Class Sentences, your Bonds — which we'll also go over at some point — and then a list of things called Ephemera. Which are, I think right now, you should all have no Ephemera but you might get some as play. Ephemera are, like, narratively charged objects. You know? The Master Sword is an Ephemera. The… And it's especially in Ephemera because, if you think about the way the Master Sword works when you first get it in any Zelda game it's, like: “Yo! I'm so powerful!”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: “Like, this fixes everything!” By the end of the game it's just kind of, like… “you know, you need the Master Sword. This dungeon is built around the Master Sword. It's not, like, a big deal that you have it anymore.” But all… other things are here that could be Ephemeral are, like, lucky charms, or keys, or… immaterial things — like, the allegiance of a major faction that you could call on to solve something. So an Impulse says: anytime that you do this thing you will get your Token back if you've already spent it. So, for instance, let's say you have responded to an urgent problem with ritualistic Means — imagine that your house is on fire and the witch is, like: “Ah! I know a ritual for that!” [chuckles]
Alex: [chuckles] Mm-hm.
Austin: I… “Let me quickly do a seance to summon the ghost of dousing fires or whatever!” You're, like: “Okay. Stop. We have to get out of here.” You would get your Token back. So that's one element there. Tell me about your character, tell me about Floog’artha.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] with I want to emphasize there is an apostrophe in there…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …after the “Floog”.
Brad: Right. The apostrophe makes it a little bit mysterious. You know?
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yes. Yeah.
Brad: Makes it a little bit eldritch I… I picked a witch, because… First of all, I have not done a lot of tabletop.
Austin: Sure.
Brad: But I figured what better way to roleplay than with the ability to conjure and incantate whenever?
Austin: [overlapping] Yes.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Brad: Just make things happen out of thin air? Um… [overlapping] And the backstory…
Austin: [overlapping] Which is you asked this right before we started playing actually. Right?
Brad: Yeah.
Austin: Which was, like, can I just cast whatever spell I want?
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] And the answer is, like, yes.
Brad: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] As long as the Sentence allows for it.
Brad: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] As long as you've hit the… whatever the requirements are.
Brad: Sure. So here's the backstory — you tell me if this is a cop-out or not…
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm…
Brad: [overlapping] “A shadowy character of nebulous origin and dubious intent.”
Austin: [overlapping] Ah, listen…!
Brad: [overlapping] “Joins in alliances of…” Yeah?
Austin: Go ahead. Finish your… Finish it.
Brad: Yeah. “Joins in alliances of convenience but seeks a solitary power. Harbors secret resentments and grandiose aspirations. Finds order in chaos.”
Alex: [overlapping] I love it.
Austin: [overlapping] I think that's great for a one-shot.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah!
Austin: [overlapping] I would say if we were trying to do, like, a super-long-running campaign I'd be, like: “ooh, we maybe want a little more.” But I think it's perfect.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: Yeah. I was worried the lack of origin might be a little bit of a cop-out. But then also when I got most of the way through this I realized I had basically made Palpatine? [chuckles] So…!
Austin: [overlapping] [chuckles] So it’s perfect what you’re telling me.
Brad: [overlapping] So my look is garbed in heavy wool robes, a drooping cowl obscuring the eyes.
Austin: Perfect. Ideal.
Alex: Brad, you're buzzing a slight bit.
Brad: Oh, sorry. Yes.
Vinny: Witch voice.
Alex: Yeah. [overlapping] That's the witch voice. There we go.
Vinny: [overlapping] That’s the witch voice.
Austin: [overlapping] It’s the witch voice. It’s the witch voice coming in.
Vinny: Yeah.
Brad: [voice garbled] Is it still doing it?
Vinny: A little bit, yes.
Brad: Well, how about now?
Alex: [overlapping] Now you sound fine.
Vinny: [overlapping] Better. Better.
Austin: [overlapping] Love it.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh.
Brad: Nothing a little power cycle won't solve. Or maybe not. I don't know…
Alex: [overlapping] You're fine. You're fine.
Vinny: [overlapping] No. I think you’re…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. It’s better now. It seems all right
Brad: [overlapping] Should I…?
Austin: [overlapping] If it does happen we'll just say that it's witch voice coming through.
Brad: Witch voice.
Vinny: [overlapping] Witch voice.
Alex: [overlapping] Witch voice.Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Something dark in your blood coming through your voice.
Brad: [overlapping] The demons are moving through me.
Austin: [chuckles] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] The dem… the demondex [inaudible – 00:13:04]
Brad: [overlapping] Can I take a… Sorry. Can I take a quick opportunity to ask one question?
Austin: Absolutely.
Brad: [overlapping] [unintelligible] [inaudible – 00:13:10]
Austin: [overlapping] Whenever anybody has a question please just interrupt and ask me. Yeah.
Brad: “I always hide my shelter” is one of my Sentences. Is that, like, a psychological shelter, or…
Vinny: Oohhh…!
Austin: At this point it's broad in a way that you can take advantage of. Right?
Brad: Oh.
Austin: It's only a +0 Sentence. Which means, let's say someone's trying to find you with… you know… “I always find my foes when a bounty's been placed on their heads,” for instance. You would lose to that with… “I always hide my shelter.” But the breadth of it means it could mean a psychological shelter. It means, like, I always have a place I can go to in my mind to stay focused. It could mean I always have a JRPG-style…
Brad: Hm…
Austin: …magical tent that I can summon and retreat into.
Brad: [overlapping] [chuckles] Okay!
Austin: [overlapping] Or, like, into the coven of souls or something… It could mean “I always am able to convert a room into a place that's,” like… “this is my shelter now.” And we've kind of, like, put salt around it to keep it safe. The breadth is an opportunity for you to go wild. You know? And then, again, as it gets Realized that will get smaller and smaller. 
I think it's an… really important for people playing this game not to do what I call pre-Realization. I haven't written this in the book. But having run it a bunch now a thing I run into is people go: “oh, I get it. ‘I always hide my shelter for me means I summon a little Baba Yaga hut and I get into the Baba Yaga hut.” And that's awesome. You can totally do that with that Sentence. And then the Baba Yaga hut, like, fades from existence or something. Totally possible.
But that shouldn't be the only way you see the Sentence at this point: the open-endedness is its strength. The character slowly… You know — let's take the Baba Yaga style witch as an example — you could imagine someone who starts, that does the Baba Yaga witch summon… or hut summoning, but also is psychologically, you know, locked in or something. But by the end of the game maybe they've lost that ability to lock in psychologically and instead they literally have to retreat to the hut if they want safety.Right? So…
Brad: Got it. Okay.
Austin: …kind of that's the kind of shape of how it works.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Vinny: [overlapping] “I always hide my shelter,” which is Hard Markinson's soul.
Austin: [sighs]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Here we go. Hard Markinson. You return.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: I do. So am I up next or…
Austin: [overlapping] Let’s do it.
Alex: [overlapping] …is there more Brad? Is there anything else you wanted to say?
[00:15:00]
Alex: All right. So, yes. Hard Markinson is, in fac, returning for this campaign. It seemed like the right thing to do. Uh…
Austin: I love it.
Alex: As with all… With all of our campaigns this version of Hard might not be the same one exactly from other campaigns, but… So, this version of Hard Markinson is a Xenagogue, who — as far as I can tell — is sort of, like, the pilot Class of… the various available ones. But specifically… it is a pilot of an Orphan Vessel. Which as I… I asked about previously, are apparently ships that are not only derelict and found and then, you know, reclaimed. But also maybe bear some kind of, like, psychic link to the piloter. So…
Austin: That is right. Yeah.
Alex: Well.
Austin: The… It is a psychic link or it's a… I mean, it's actually up to you. Right?
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: You'll note that your first Sentence started as “I always pilot my ❧Orphan Vessel☙ with great skill.” And the Orphan Vessel is in those florons. That's the Hallmark.
Alex: Yes.
Austin: And that Means that you could def… decide what that means. Even inside of one campaign of Realis one Orphan Vessel might be… you know, psychically linked with the ship; another one might literally be a sort of hollowed-out whale with technological implements installed [overlapping] but it's still alive…
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: Another one might have its whole consciousness in a gem in the cockpit or in the engine room or something — but they're all sentient in some way.
Alex: Right.
Austin: [overlapping] What’s up with yours?
Alex: [overlapping] So the way I envision… Yeah. So the way I envision my Tinman here — Brad, that's a Star Trek reference for you.
Brad: Oh, yeah.
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: Is most of the ship has, like, the shape and technological makeup of something, like, let's just say, like, The Defiant from… DS9. But it is interspersed with pieces of bioluminescent technology on the outside and on the inside.
Austin: [overlapping] Sick.
Alex: [overlapping] There is, like, you know, kind of a neon glow that comes from that stuff — that all kind of, like, feeds into the back engine room.Wwhere there is something that I would describe that looks like sort of, like, the gravity drive from Event Horizon. But, like, not quite as menacing and gothic. Like, a little bit more… it looks like there either is a connection to some kind of lifeforce, or is itself a lifeforce.
Austin: Love it. Love it. I love that… And this is the ship [chuckles] that you all call home…
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] …or at least are on for this mission? I guess one other really important thing here… A couple of things. Bonds exist between characters. So, for instance, you have two. You have “Selex couldn't find their own ass if someone slapped it for them. Poor thing.”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] And “Floog’artha is the most precious cargo my vessel ever carried. I won't ruin this job.”
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] Those are just like Sentences. They're Means. You can call on those when there's a Conflict. So, for instance, let's say Floog’artha was in trouble… Like, you know someone's trying to attack Floog’artha. You could use your Bond to try to save Floog’artha if that was… your goal. You know what I mean?
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] Even though… Even if you don't have another Sentence that could help in that situation that would allow it. Or, likewise, with Selex, if you wanted to do something similar you could do that. Right?
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: And then related to that… If we all hop over to the Band and World sheet…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: We don't have a name for this Band. Um… You know, I'm just gonna write, like, the the salvagers…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Or I guess… you're investigating something? Right? You're… We picked the Sentence, kind of. But we didn't pick what the name or whatever is. I guess it could just be the crew of the… What was it again? Was it the Tin Can? [overlapping] The Tin Man?
Alex: [overlapping] The Tinman. The Tinman.
Austin: [overlapping] The Tinman. Okay. Um. Your Band Sentence is “When we work together we always uncover what time has hidden.” This is a… a Sentence that's, like, one of the example Sentences… in the book, for… for Bands. I'm just putting in the example here: “A team of researchers digging into the strange mysteries of Realis.” This is a Sentence that you can use if all of you unanimously decide to use it.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: It starts at +1. You can use it once per session. And it only works if everybody says: “Yeah, let's do that.”
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Because it tends to be pretty broad, right? Like, you always learn a thing that time is hidden. That's very… It's not about an action, it's about an outcome and that's really useful. You know?
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: You'll also see there's a few other things already on this sheet… that start to kind of tease a little bit about where we're going. You'll see the there is a moon called “Derelict 383 Black Demerit”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Aka “The Thrummer.” Everyone calls it The Thrummer or, like…
Alex: [overlapping] Hell yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …people in the Investigation and Salvage name because it releases this strange hum. Repeatedly. It has an Impulse, also. Moons have Impulses and Sentences. Moons are just settings, they don't have to be literally moons. This is a Derelict of what's called a Grand Vessel. Before you had your Little Orphan vessel there — in the ancient past — there were these Grand Vessels that were, like, city-states unto themselves. And this one was… is now called 383 Black Demerit under, like, some sort of new… you know, categorization naming schema. But everybody just calls it The Thrummer, because of the weird hum it has.
Vinny: Hmm.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: And its Impulse is “Give yourself to the dark.”
Alex: [overlapping] Hmm!
Austin: [overlapping] So when you do something that is giving yourself to the dark you can get your Token back! It tends to be that Moon Impulses drive you closer into danger, or at least drama. Moons also have Sentences, and these are important. There are two listed here. I have a list of some other ones. But one of the things you can spend your Token to do in play is add more Moon Sentences that you wrote. So the Moons are kind of neutral Territory between player characters and Factions and other NPCs. But when you spend your Token, you can either use an established Moon Sentence for yourself or you can add and use a new one.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Moon Sentences that you know about The Thrummer are: "The Thrummer's hull is always unbreakable” and “The Thrummer’s Scavengers always trade Salvage for supplies.” So there are other scavenging groups here — maybe people who've lived here as scavengers for years — and they will always trade something that they've salvaged from this vast floating city-state derelict for food or something like that. There are also some other ones that I know about…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …that you don't know about yet.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: But they're not real yet! They're not…
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: You know, if you all decided “fuck it, let's do a Token rush and fill this sheet up with our own Sentences instead of Austin's”...
Vinny: Hm…!
Austin: They'd be filled up! You know?
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Which is… Which is goofy and fun. There's also something, you know… I… We talked about a little bit tone and stuff. Um… This system has a thing called Foundation Sentences. You might have come across Lines and Veils before in tabletop games and tabletop communities. That's one way of what are called safety rules often. Where it's, like: “Hey, this is the type of thing we want to include; this is the type of thing we don't want to include.” “Hey, I don't like spiders. No spiders.” Right?
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: In Realis we use Foundation Sentences which are written in a format similar to, like, character Sentences. And… it's a way to guide our play. It's both… kind of additive and subtractive. So, for instance, we do have “Our story never relies on gruesome detail.” It doesn't mean they can't get gruesome.
Alex: Hm.
Austin: But it never… The scene should never just be “oh, there's some guts falling out of a stomach, blehhg”
Alex: Right.
Austin: Like, that's the whole of the scene. But it does also have additive stuff, like: “Our story always stays metal as fuck” [chuckles]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: And… our always takes… “Our story always takes the big swing now, not later.”
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: So… So, in other words, play hard and fast. Don't, you know… hold back something that you think could be cool — because we're not doing a Session 2! Let's all put it all on the table!
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: I've left this… kind of formatted one here: “Our story will tell, but only with distance and care…” dot dot dot, in case someone wanted to say: “Hey I don't like spiders, but I don't mind if spiders show up.” Or: “Hey, we're telling a story about a space empire — maybe there's slavery… in the empire.” But we're not telling a story about slavery. But some slaves might pop up. Right?
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: So if there's anything like that and you all think of it let me know I'll add it to the list somewhere. And that's… And that'll be that. Finally, also on this sheet are Factions and… NPCs. And there's one main faction that is in… Pretend we're coming into the middle of your campaign, effectively.
Alex: Right.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: You've run across the Venerant See a few times here. I've also written See wrong, actually. It's not sea like… an ocean. It's see like the Holy See [overlapping] of, for instance, a major church.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, for sure.
Alex: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: The Venerant See is a… is the predominant religion in your version of Realis. It is a… vast, powerful, and hypocritical church. They worship someone called The Immaterial One and they believe in immateriality. They believe in asceticism — which is the way that they get people to donate all of their goods to the church. [chuckles] Uh… Which somehow ends up in church vaults but also, you know… gemstones worn by… They put on the weight of needing to be the people who take all of your wealth [overlapping] and wear it around their chest.
Vinny: [overlapping] We know these mfers.
Austin: [overlapping] You know these mfers.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] A hundred percent.
Alex: [overlapping] Catholics.
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: Um. You know. A certain… A certain breed of Catholics, [overlapping] I think.
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh-huh.
Alex: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: I was…! I was raised Catholic!
Alex: Uh-huh.
Vinny: Uh-huh.
Austin: I get to say it!
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh-huh.
Austin: [overlapping] So… You know.
Alex: [overlapping] I wasn't. I don't.
Austin: [laughs]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: A couple of things that you know that they can do, are listed here. And then there are a handful of… NPCs: an Inquisitor, a Zealot and a Helmsman — a Charioteer, actually — are also all here. And you’ve run into them a little bit, but you don't know at all what the Charioteer does; you only have one of the Sentences of the Zealot; and you only have two of the Sentences of the Inquisitor. These… Each will have three or four Sentences. So there's a little bit of “Huh, what do we know about them? What could they… What tricks could they pull out on us?”
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: NPCs do not start at all +0 Sentences so they might show up with a +1 or +2 Sentence that could hit you out of nowhere. So, again there's a little bit of tactical play even in this game that's primarily about words. And I think that that's the gist of the broad setup. Unless anyone has question.
Vinny: Can you…
Austin: In which case, I'm happy to answer questions.
Vinny: Yeah. The saddest part of the… gameplay mechanic that I found was the Dream.
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Can you… Can you…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: You're right. I skipped over the Dream.
Vinny: And it was the most soul-crushing thing that, like… in the gameplay example you give in the book! [laughs]
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Vinny: Like, almost brought me to tears [overlapping] of this person uh giving up their Dream.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: The last thing I wanted to show off about my character actually was the Dream. [overlapping]
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. What is your Dream?
Alex: [overlapping] So, if you just want to pop up my character sheet…
Austin: What your dream… for Hard?
Alex: So. Hard Markinson is a pretty normal guy. Like, he literally grew up on the moon that would be most equivalent to, like, space Indiana. You know. Kind of farm colony type stuff. He's just a pilot. He's just a guy who pilots ships, generally speaking. But ever since he has found this psychic bond with this ship it unlocked something in him.
Austin: [overlapping] Hmmm…
Alex: [overlapping] Specifically, it unlocked these visions of lives that he suddenly remembers himself living in worlds that he has never experienced. And he wants to find both, like, what that means and also where this is coming from.
Austin: Incredible. So. Mechanically, Dreams are Means — which Means they can be used in Conflicts to overcome a challenge or an uncertainty. They're the most powerful Means there are. A Dream always wins unless it comes up against another Dream. So two player characters can put their Dreams against each other and they'll cancel each other out. [chuckles]
But Dreams always win. But you only get one of them in your whole life. Your Dream is a goal… You know. We're not going to probably do end-of-session stuff, but if you're working towards your Dream you get to mark an extra Sentence at the end of the session is one thing that happens, for instance. Um… But you don't have to… You have to… When you spend it you have to cross it out. It's gone forever. You get one once. You don't have to spend it getting your dream. You can spend it on anything. So it's sort of, like, that little bit in your soul that is, like…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: “I'm saving the little extra gas I need to get across the finish line when my goal is in reach.” You know, if I'm down… If I'm crawling through the nuclear vent [chuckles] in Metal Gear Solid 4…
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: …I'm drawing on my dream to get there and do the thing I need to do. And… But you don't have to spend it on that Dream. You can give it up for something else. Like saving a friend, or jumping across a Chasm. Like, it can truly be for anything. And you don't even lose the Dream. You don't erase it. You cross it out. It's always still there. It's always still on the sheet forever. You never get to rewrite it. You never get to uncross it. So, yeah. Each of you also has one of those. Sometimes those are really specific little things, like seeing your daughter again and making things right. Other times it's something… more… dramatic. Like Brad. What's your Dream?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: Maybe a little open to interpretation?
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Uh-huh.
Brad: “I will become the thousandth moon.”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Hell yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Great.
Vinny: [overlapping] I love it! I love it!
Austin: [overlapping] I have no idea what that means!
Brad: Remember… Hey, do you remember the control ending in Mass Effect, where Shephard kind of becomes the Reapers?
Vinny: Hmm…
Austin: Yes.
Brad: Let's say this character might have a secret hidden desire… [chuckles]
Austin: [chuckles]
Brad: …to dominate all of the moons.
Austin: [overlapping] Incredible.
Brad: [overlapping] Or… Or, maybe let's say, like, bring order to the moons in such a way that this character sits at the top of the hierarchy.
Austin: [overlapping] A hundred percent.
Alex: [overlapping] There is a control there.
Austin: Yeah. There is something there that is about… Yeah. You're not going to get the… You're not aiming for the Twisted Metal… Calypso tricks you and twists your dream into uh the dark reality — the monkey paw curls — [overlapping] and you become a literal moon?
Brad: [overlapping] Right.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] And everybody walks around on you?
Brad: [overlapping] Ehhh…!
Austin: And you're, like… well, technically, you're the moon.
Brad: Right. [overlapping] Maybe let’s…
Austin: [overlapping] Or maybe you are going for that.
Brad: Let's say it's an embodiment of the character's inherent grandiosity [overlapping] and self-importance.
Austin: [overlapping] I love it.
Alex: Love it.
Austin: Fantastic. All right. I think that that's everything on the sheets, generally. We don't have to go every we don't have to go Sentence by Sentence, necessarily. So, let's… Let's get into it.
Scene setting & Story beginning [00:29:21]
Austin: Everybody is aboard the Tinman… Hard's Vessel. Orphan Vessel. And you're in a particular type of place in Realis. You know, Realis is sort of a… an orbital sphere of a thousand moons all orbiting a cursed — or holy, depending on who you talk to — world called Realis. It is the big blue… planet in the background of the kind of hero image you're showing, Vinny. Behind us.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: That is Realis-Itself — often hyphenated: Realis-hyphen-Itself. And it is a…
[00:30:00] 
Austin: A place that no one or very few people have ever gone to and returned from in history. I think the… the book suggests — or maybe it's a lore-doc I haven't put in the book yet — that, like, 20 people in all of known history have ever gone and come back. And that's thousands and thousands of years. Everybody lives instead on these Moons, the thousand moons that orbit around it. Below it all is this roiling abyss that… kind of occasionally seems to swallow and devour an entire Moon. Nevertheless, there are always a thousand moons so a new one must pop up when that happen.
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: And above it all is the sun. Or a sun. The Corpse Sun. Why is it called that? I don't know! you'd have to go and check! [chuckles] You'd have to go see what's going on in the Corpse Sun.
Alex: [chuckles] It is a… It's smaller than the giant planet of Realis. It is… sort of dim… red… that it does emit light but that light is so small in comparison to the bright incandescent blue of Realis-Itself that it often gets washed out, except for the moons that are all near the Corpse Sun. The Corpse Sun does not get orbited by any moons. Realis's gravitational draw is higher. Not that, you know, any of this holds up to the laws of physics.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: We are in space fantasy here.
Alex: [overlapping] Does not matter.
Austin: [overlapping] But nothing is orbiting the Corpse Sun. Yeah. And as far as you can tell — and I think this is to the degree that, like, no one even talks about these really that much outside of maybe it's, like, a metaphorical term — stars don't exist in Realis. There's only moons. There are no outer Stars beyond the orb of Realis is just darkness… forever. And so sometimes you might see a pinprick of light — that's just a moon that's very far away. If you fly out there that's a moon reflecting back Realis's own light. Uh… So that is, like, what the… sort of solar system… I guess, Realis system is.
And in this moment you are towards that Corpse Sun. You're close enough that the kind of dim red light is coming down on top of the ship, is lighting a… kind of ship graveyard. There's this whole area between a few moons that has a bunch of Orphan Vessels that have… you know, crashed or been destroyed. Maybe there was a big war here. You're not sure. No one really knows the details of it. But kind of dominating this whole area is a gigantic Grand Vessel.
The Grand Vessels were so big that you could probably fit hundreds of the contemporary Orphan Vessels into them. Again, they’re city states in space. They don't really match any of the contemporary architectural styles or design styles. You know, campaign to campaign they can look like whatever they want. I think this one — I mentioned the word whale before — it kind of has the shape of a giant whale. But is kind of plated with an armored hull.
And there are a couple of things that, you know, these Grand Vessels… — the derelicts of them — are so… strange, that they do end up getting… attracting different types of people to them. People like you, people who are investigating mysteries. I think that maybe you have gotten word there is something very valuable here. Or there's a set of valuables. Maybe you just know if we can get in there we can get a real good payday [chuckles] Or it's the sort of place that has the sort of knowledge that both Floog’artha and Hard might be interested in. And so you're been drawn there to get aboard and find some information.
You're not the only one who's been drawn there, though. As of right now… there's kind of a few ways that you could theoretically get in. You could try to breach the unbreakable hull of the ship, which… that seems hard. You could try to go somehow open up the… there's a vast aperture that can open up that's like a docking bay. But it's sealed shut right now and it has been for centuries, probably. And then there is one, like, space station in orbit of… it's not even in orbit. Because it's actually connected with a gangway to the derelict. To The Thrummer. And it is a… Venerant See space station. 
It's sort of like a… a station for pilgrims to visit. So there's, like, you know… a sort of… you imagine almost, like, a church just hovering in space with a long, like, docking arm — you know — gangway, an enclosed gangway connecting to this giant carcass of a once grand citystate ship. And, you know, in that place, theoretically, you could dock there, talk your way through and walk through the gangway.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: But, you know, those are the kind of the big… That's the image of what you see. I'd love to just get an image of each of you on the ship…
Alex: Okay.
Austin: … as action kicks off. What are you… What are you doing on the ship as you bounce around from moon to moon going on adventures? What's our one image of each of your characters?
Alex: Who wants to go first?
Vinny: [overlapping] Well, you go first.
Austin: [overlapping] Let's go… Let's go with the… Yeah. The captain. The pilot.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] The Xenagogue.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Hard.
Alex: So. As we are… you know, drifting in the direction of this giant ship and the space cathedral that is attached to it… Hard is looking straight out the, you know, the view window, the front… of the ship. Looking straight at it. Kinda leaning back in his chair — we're a little bit on autopilot right now. We're just kind of on approach vector. And he's just kind of leaning back. Cigarette, kind of dangling out of his mouth. Unlit. It's more of an oral fixation than it is, like, a need to smoke. And… you know he's just kind of fidgeting with it looking at it. And there's, like, a little bit of tension and nervousness as he kind of looks at this thing because I have to imagine that him and the Venerant See are maybe not the most closely aligned organizations.
But as he sort of psychically, you know… gets… like, Bonds with the ship itself there is a slight calming and, like, you know… anti-anxiety effect that comes with that — as if the ship is reassuring him that “look, we're not… we don't…” You know. “Things are going to be okay.” And you just feel him kind of, like, ease back into his chair and kind of deep sigh.
Austin: Does… Do you talk to the ship? Or is it this kind of emotional…? I guess, actually, more my… You could talk to the ship. My question is: does the ship talk back?
Alex: [overlapping] Not in words.
Austin: [overlapping] Or is it this emotional…
Alex: [overlapping] Not in words.
Austin: Not in words. I love it. Great. [overlapping] it’s amazing.
Alex: [overlapping] It's not words. It is more like an impulse that I understand.
Austin: Cool. I love it. All right let's go to… Let's go to Selex.
Vinny: I think Selex is probably at the workbench in the ship. Like, repairing… gear. Think, like, you know — I assume we have not a lot of… tons of money and stuff —
Austin: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [overlapping] …so it's constantly duct taping and repairing and old Ghostbusters-proton-pack-style things…
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [overlapping] …of getting everything together. And twisting and turning and dismantling broken salvage they found. And he's got the… you know, the… whatever the equivalent of this world's magnifying lenses that go down.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] You know, like, chk-chk-chk-chk-chk-chk.
Austin: It's a bunch of them.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: I love it.
Vinny: But it's, like… You know it's future-esque, so they're automated. And they just go on their own to, like…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] a tiny little thing. And this one has a laser pointer because that would be cool.
Austin: [chuckles]
Vinny: And he's got… his hands in those things that they have in weird medical facilities — but this is, like, the Nebuchadnezzar-style thing. To do like, remote arms for… you know, little soldering and stuff like that — is he's kind of zapping. But whistling! You know? Just, like…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: ...kind of, like, happy. He's got… some headphones in, maybe. [overlapping] But, you know, he’s…
Austin: [overlapping] What type of stuff you’re listening? What are you listening to in those headphones?
Vinny: Uh… He's listening to the equivalent of, like… Credence, but whatever…
Alex: [overlapping] Space Credence?
Vinny: [overlapping] You know, this would be…
Austin: [overlapping] Space Credence?!?
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah Space Credence. Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Love it. Love it.
Vinny: [overlapping] Like, [imitates electric guitar riff] whe-whe-whaeee… [chuckles] [imitates electric guitar riff descending] whe-he-wha-wha-wha-whaaa…
Austin: [chuckles]
Vinny: And he's, you know, kind of nodding along. But he's always kind of daydreaming about, like, his kid. He, like… wondering…
Austin: Cool.
Vinny: Like, she's forever trapped at, like, 14-15 in his mind.
Austin: How many years ago was that?
Vinny: Um. I was leaving it indeterminate…
Austin: Okay.
Vinny: But… [overlapping] enough where she…
Alex: [overlapping] Are we thinking decades?
Vinny: Yeah. She would be a grown adult.
Austin: [overlapping] Okay. Got you. Cool.
Vinny: [overlapping] Like, has been at least decades. But it's… He hasn't seen her and is always a kid. And, like… I imagine, like, his Token is something from their childhood. Right? Some, like…
Austin: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …a stub from a thing they saw that he has to remember her. And he's just kind of doing this. He could do it… he could do it so well he could do it on autopilot.
Austin: [overlapping] Mm-hm. Hmm.
Vinny: [overlapping] So he's just kind of he's off in his happy place listening to his music. Just doing this.
Austin: Incredible. Finally: Floog’artha.
Brad: Mm-hm?
Austin: Where do we see you aboard the Tinman? What's your… What's your resting face? [chuckles] What's your… basic…
Brad: [chuckles]
Austin: What's your idle animation?
Brad: [overlapping] Right.
Alex: [overlapping] What's your state?
Brad: Right.
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: My default posture is to brood in a corner of the bridge.
Austin: Hmmm.
Brad: Meditating on my arcane abilities and preparing myself for the next opportunity that offers some kind of personal advancement.
Austin: Love it.
Start of the action [00:39:24] 
Austin: So. I guess this probably Falls to Hard. Or maybe you've had some sort of conversation previously. But what do you think your way into this place is going to be? Do you have a… Do you have a plan for getting through the unbreakable hull or sneaking past the Venerant See… Or some other option I have not considered because that's how roleplaying games work?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] Um. I…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah I was going to ask a question here. Sorry. Go ahead, Brad.
Brad: Well, I wonder if I could reach out with my mind and try to find some kind of release mechanism in the…
Austin: [overlapping] Interesting.
Brad: [overlapping] …I think you said another docking port? Not the… Right.
Austin: [overlapping] There's a giant aperture that's, like… it would open up to be, you know, the size of a city, effectively. [chuckles] You know?
Brad: Right.
Austin: But so… you could totally try to do that.
Brad: Okay.
Austin: Hard.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] What was your question?
Alex: My question was is there any history of these various Orphan Ships ever being able to link with one another? Psychically, energetically, whatever? Like, is there a way that the ships can communicate with one another?
Austin: Almost certainly. Um… That's the sort of detail I'm happy to let… It's funny. Like, as talking to a microphone about this game I realize I have to both answer the generic question…
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] …and the particular campaign question.
Alex: Sure.
Austin: If I don't say that I'm answering the broader “this is true about all Realises everywhere” question assume I'm just talking about this campaign.
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] I just want to make sure people at home know that what I say here isn't the only canon or something. Yes! In this version of Realis — in this time in this place — there… it's rare but it happens. And it tends to happen in moments of what can only be understood as high emotional pressure between two Vessels.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Um… It's not a thing that, like, every Vessel can be, like… You know you have communications equipment aboard that can talk back and forth.
Alex: Right.
Austin: [overlapping] That’s… Exactly.
Alex: [overlapping] Regular, like, radio signals and things like that.
Austin: The Vessels themselves need to either hate each other…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …or love each other or depend on each other in some way for it to spark and the two vessels to directly psychically, you know, communicate. And that communication is not like talking.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] It's like you said, it's this kind of, like, raw emotional Impulse you know bouncing. So that's… true for this world.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Also, really quick before we continue: I want to shout out two artists Sam Beck did some of the art you've been showing on screen, Vinny.
Vinny: Hmm.
Austin: The big Realis kind of set of moons and the abyss below and then. Also did the interior art. I think you showed the Seventh Moon — the Cursed Moon of Yazerin.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: With a big ship flying overhead.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: Sam Beck did all of those as postcards, originally, for Friends at the Table’s Patreon — Friendsatthetable.cash — years ago. And we finally got to, now that the game is out, [chuckles] share them in the main book. And the cover art of the book — which is also the cover art of the main Realis podcast now — is done by Oddesque, who is a fantastic artist. Really gorgeous cover art. Really fun, really dark and cool. So, check both of them out before I forget.
Alex: All right.
Austin: So, yes. Brad, if you're interested in you can try to reach around… I think it might be hard to immediately find the switch to pull with a single Conflict, if that makes sense. But you definitely can at least try to do some sort of ritual or something that lets you see inside and try to locate… you know, figure out what's going on in there.
Brad: [overlapping] Sure. Hope to do some intel gathering.
Austin: [overlapping] To me it sounds like we're at our first… Yeah. Exactly some intel gathering. It sounds like we're at what I would say is our first Conflict. Or at least our first uncertainty.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] I don't know if you can do that. I think on paper it makes sense that you could maybe do it…!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: But a normal person couldn't just use their mind or use magic to look inside… Neither of your other companions could probably do that. But maybe you can. So, I get to say this is uncertain. Which Means are you using to clarify that uncertainty?
Brad: Uh…
Austin: To succeed?
Brad: My +1 Sentence “I always know which old words serve my aims.”
Austin: Love it.
Vinny: Hmmm…!
Austin: So, what is the… What's that look like? Because I don't think this is being opposed. No one's going to try to… You know, at this point get involved against you. What is the… What are the old words that uh serve your aims?
Brad: I suppose that looks like sinking into a deep trance and maybe murmuring some… slightly unintelligible words…?
Austin: Uh-huh.
Brad: [overlapping] And trying to…
Austin: [overlapping] Uhh…
Brad: Yeah?
Austin: Go ahead. You go ahead.
Brad: Oh. Sorry. And then just trying to… kind of extend my consciousness around this giant Vessel and see… see what it feels like.
Austin: Yeah. I think… A couple of things. A couple of things happen at once. The first is that you get a pretty clear image of this first opening area… beyond the big docking aperture. It is a… again, a vast docking area. But it doesn't look like a docking area for most… You've been in space stations before. You've been in Orphan Vessels that Dock. And most of them are, like, pretty clean simple things. This… This feels so much more like coming up to a seaport. There are individual… there, like, hundreds of individual little docking like… Not bays. But, like, you almost like there's a bridge out, like, out into the water — except the water is the sky. You know, is empty space. And then and then there's almost, like, a coastal… a little coastal village that's completely abandoned as far as you can tell. Maybe there's the occasional skittering of a creature or a body in the shadows. But it's almost like a little tiered seaside village… of… it looks like claywork buildings.
[00:45:05]
Austin: And, you know, you're kind of scanning around. You've succeeded. And I've actually moved too quickly here for one thing, but… It seemed, like, your intent was try to find a way to open this thing. Right? I think from the outside looking in… Or sorry, from the inside now looking around… the mechanism for opening it is… It takes you a second to locate it. It isn't a physical switch or something. It's an enchanted bell. There's a big bell that hangs above this city that you have to ring with a particular implement in order to open the aperture. And that's not something you can do with your magic.
You know immediately… you can't just, like, hit the… the bell with, like, a hit of, you know, force. You could try it, even. You know, everyone hears the Bell go off, even through the empty air of space — you know… the emptiness of space. Everyone hears the [imitates the low ring of a bell] donnnng of this bell. But nothing happens. And so somewhere in there, there must be the hammer that will ring the bell to open the aperture and let you actually dock the ship which would let you, you know, fill the ship with goodies… [chuckles]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] …and get out of here. Right? So that's what you see.
Brad: Okay.
Vinny: Do you share that with… [overlapping] with everybody?
Brad: [overlapping] Oh! Yeah. I was… I was about to ask do I need to specify that I communicate this to people?
Austin: Yeah!
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. You know, normally, I might not say so. But…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] But your particular character, Floog’artha…
Brad: [overlapping] It’s true.
Austin: I want to make sure: you are in control [overlapping] of what you're sharing with the class.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: Just in case you do want to hold on to some stuff. You know?
Brad: I am completely open about all this information to the crew.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Awesome I think this is really important because that Sentence you use that's very powerful — “I always know which words serve my aims” — you can only use it if it's your aims.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Right? So… I think something very fun about the way you've written this character, you realized that Sentence is… it's a very selfish Sentence.
Brad: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: [overlapping] And if you ever feel, like, being selfless you will not be able to use it. You know?
Brad: Ohh! Oh.
Austin: Right?
Brad: [overlapping] Even…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. That makes sense.
Brad: [overlapping] Even if my aims are identical to the larger aims… or…?
Austin: [overlapping] I think as long as your aims are identical. But you can never do something selfless.
Brad: [overlapping] Interesting. Oh.
Austin: [overlapping] You can never do something altruistic with that Sentence.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Right?
Brad: Interesting. Okay.
Alex: [overlapping] That makes good sense.
Austin: [overlapping] Um… So think about…
Brad: [overlapping] I’m not sure I realized that.
Austin: I mean, yeah. Well… this is how…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: This is how you get yourself a little bit in Realis…
Alex: [overlapping] Yup, yup.
Austin: [overlapping] …is, you realize in a way that feels kind of open-ended. But there's always… This is the tricky thing about language.
Brad: [overlapping] Hmm. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] There's always a slight restriction in there when you start adding clauses and so… In these types of clauses, anyway.
Brad: Good to know.
Austin: So. All right.
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Austin: [overlapping] So, yeah. You know this. Everyone now has an image of this place. I don't know if that's what you thought it would be or not. There isn't a lot of information about what goes on inside of these Grand Vessels. But certainly you've never heard of one that has a little [chuckles] seaside village right next to the… docking area.
Vinny: Um. So we just have to ring the bell. [overlapping] Is that…
Alex: [overlapping] Potentially, with the right instrument.
Austin: [overlapping] You got to get in there somehow… With the right instrument. Not just ring it, but with the right… hammer.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Um… But is the bell… Is the Bell… is there anything protecting the bell? [overlapping] Like… Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] It's all inside: everything that Brad just reported was past the aperture.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] So you have to get on board somehow and then ring the bell. It's on the top of a tower. You know, it's, like, the top of… a belltower.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: So stairs [chuckles] would be in between…
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm. Uh-huh.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] …you and the tower.
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh-huh. Okay.
Austin: But that's kind of the big one.
Vinny: [overlapping] We have to get through the aperture.
Austin: [overlapping] But no, you didn’t see…
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: Yeah. Exact… Well, you would hope to, right? I guess… I guess you could just try to get in a different way! A hundred percent. But if you want to open this big… aperture that gives you access to the kind of docking village of this… big ship, that is how you would do it.
Brad: Yeah, my feeling is that is a way out rather than a way in.
Austin: Oh, interesting.
Vinny: Hmm.
Alex: Yeah. That feels… That feels right to me. I think Hard is going to kind of take this information and he's going to look particularly at Selex and say:
Hard Markinson: All right, bud. [sighs] What's your… What's your standing with the Venerant See these days? Because I can say that mine is… not optimal.
Vinny: Um… Selex would know that the Venerant See also has systems that need repair, and…
Austin: True.
Vinny: …and maintenance. And Selex would like to play “I always find a simple but effective solution.”
Austin: Ouhh!
Vinny: Which is Selex would say:
Vinny (as Selex): They constantly have a system… they're… I know for a fact that they filter enough water that their filtration systems are — because they have to make all kinds of concoctions to sell, to be holy waters and these things — that their filtration systems are always on the fritz. And I happen to have a fresh set of filters in the back here that we could just say that we are bringing in for a delivery.
Austin: I love it. I love it. Yeah. So do you… radio them up and make that announcement…? Or, make that claim?
Alex: Yeah. Hard's going to get on the horn here through the traditional radio means, and he's going to try and make contact with the station.
Austin: Yeah. I think it's an immediate pickup. Um…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Though you can hear the sound of people in the background and the person on the other side of the comm, there's an almost… there's an almost relieved voice. Maybe they're relieved to be talking to you instead of visitors. I'm not sure.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: They go… Uh…
Austin (as Venerant See communication officer): This is the… This is… The Progress. Um. Who's calling us?
Alex (as Hard Markinson): Uh, this is Captain Hard Markinson of the USC whatever-the-hell… Tinman. We got a… We got a… a delivery of a water filtration equipment we are supposed to be making here. We are requesting permission to dock.
Communication officer: Well we… we don't have any… visitin’… visitors on the schedule besides the ones we already have. Do you have any verification or… evidence of an order being placed or…
Austin: This is someone trying to use a Sentence against you.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: I will add it, in fact, to the sheet for you. The Venerant See as a Faction has a set of Sentences.
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] And one of them is… “Venerant See parishioners are always suspicious informants.” And so I will add that here to the thing. It's only a +0 Sentence, which means you can beat it… In Realis… kind of ties go to the defender, so to speak.
Alex: Hmm!
Austin: So if you have a +0 Sentence that you think can counter that, there… their intent is to… Because the way that…conflict works in Realis is someone decides “I'm going to take some action to shake up the status quo. I declare a dramatic intent.” In this case their dramatic intent is, to say: “No, sorry. You don't get to come here right now.”
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] And then for you to be convinced by that. Then they declare their Means. If they're a player character they should declare if they're using a Token or if they're using a Bond or a Dream also, you know, whatever. Not also. But, you know. Instead of. And then… the counteractor decides what to do with that information. In this case… I guess, you don't… — you don't technically know it's a +0 Sentence — but you've never seen it before.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: It reads like a +0 Sentence. Sometimes that gets tricky. Sometimes something you'll hear, like: “Well, that sounds like a +1.” But it's really a +2, because there was a change in verb or something
Alex: Sure.
Austin: But in this case you're pretty sure it's a +0 Sentence.
Alex: So there's a couple of ways I could potentially attack this. I think I'm going to go with the more simple option here, which is another +0 Sentence that I have which is: “I always announce my presence with unmistakable flair.”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] I love it.
Alex: [overlapping] So I would like to say that when I’m making this call I am putting the charm on to this…
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: …probably not particularly easily charmed space catholic… and I am simply going to say, something along the lines of, you know:
Hard Markinson: I understand this was a last minute order. We were under… We were to understand that these water filters were needed very urgently. We want to make sure that no one on your station becomes ill or… otherwise, you know… infirm situation. We would very much like to simply deliver these things, take a brief rest and then find our way out of here.
Communication officer: Okay, of course. Of course. Of-of course. Um. Please move to the Retroquire docking area, please.
Austin: And I'm going to mark the Sentence “Venerant See parishioners are always suspicious informants.” You've succeeded at countering the Sentence. Which means: one, I cross it out for the rest of the scene which — in this case I'm going to say — while you're aboard this space station…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: …they don't get to be suspicious informants.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] But I'm also marking it. If it gets marked three times it can Realize.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] It's Primed, it can Realize and level up. And at that point it can get unmarked even inside of a scene where it has been countered. That probably won't come up. But it does often come up when you have kind of repeat encounters with…
Alex: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: [overlapping] …a group or a character.
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Austin: [overlapping] And you get… you know, there's a sort of a set of… free-floating lanterns in space. Or free… They're almost, like, in my mind… you know kind of, like, bowls with a candle in them. Like, that style of, like, a basin with the flame coming out. Almost like an eternal flame. Just floating in space. They go, like: [imitates sounds of flames] fwhu-fwhu-fwhu.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, nice.
Alex: [overlapping] Hmm!
Austin: [overlapping] They all light up giving you the docking… you know, guidance.
Vinny: Does it make that… that noise that all the movies make when they go into a warehouse and the lights go [imitates sounds of industrial switches] khnk-kn-khnk?
Austin: [imitates a similar sound] Khu-khunk.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah. Right. [imitates the sound again] kn-kn-kn-kn-knhk.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. A hundred percent.
Vinny: Great.
Austin: Yes. And you're able to pull right in. Um… And there… No one comes out to greet you here. I think this is a traditional setup where you pull alongside the station, a docking arm comes out, and, like, latches onto the side of your ship. A pretty traditional setup for the way that's that this goes.
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Austin: [overlapping] So, yeah. You're docked. No one seems to come out to, like… No one's knocking on the side of the door. The interior… you know, air locks are just ready to go whenever you're ready to leave the ship.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: What do you do?
Alex: I think as we walk out — I assume we're going to head outside the ship — as we walk out, I do my one traditional thing which is to give the ship, like, a little you know…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] …touch on my way out. Just as like a “stay here, bud.” You know, you would, like, a loyal dog kind of thing.
Austin: Yeah. The feeling it gives you back is sort of, like, when a small dog… Imagine you're… leashing a small dog to, like, a fence or something. You're leaving it briefly behind somewhere. Or, like, a tree. But there's a big dog nearby.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] So there's a little bit of nervousness.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: You could feel it leaving the ship as you, like… the nervousness kind of releases as you do your little hand tap.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: You know?
Alex: Similar to the way it alleviated my anxiety earlier, I am doing the same for it.
Austin: That's right. Love it. Um…
Brad: [overlapping] Um… As I get…
Austin: [overlapping] As you… Yep.
Brad: I think… I think I run this question by the crew: are we concerned with any pretense whatsoever of delivering the cargo… [chuckles]
Austin: [chuckles]
Brad: …that we claim to have? I'm guessing we do not.
Alex: I… I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of walking out with, like, some boxes or something that just sort of looks like we are doing the thing we said we were going to do. And then maybe just sort of carrying those to wherever it is we think we should go.
Vinny: Yeah. I mean… Selex is:
Selex: I've got a couple of filters in here. I… I can go hand them off to the… the first folks we find.
Hard Markinson: Yeah, we just need to pass the sniff test.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Selex: [overlapping] I know these religious folks.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: I think this is… You know what? I'm going to go ahead and say that I think this is uncertain. Just even… Do you have a… Does anyone have a Sentence that can, like… justify that you have some boxes around, you could toss together some fakes? I'm sure someone has something. I'm just curious what it is.
Vinny: I mean… Can I use the [overlapping] “I always find a simple but effective solution” again?
Austin: [overlapping] You totally can.
Vinny: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Austin: Absolutely.
Vinny: [overlapping] Like the…
Austin: [overlapping] So, easy. Boom.
Vinny: Yeah. [overlapping] This is like…
Austin: [overlapping] One of the reasons… Go ahead, Vinny.
Vinny: Well, yeah. This is just, like… They'll work to filter water [chuckles] But, like…
Austin: Yup.
Vinny: You know, maybe won’t get the microplastics out.
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: [chuckles]
Vinny: You know what I mean?
Austin: Yeah. Perfect. You know, the reason I asked that is one of the things that happens at the end of the session — again, we probably won't do end of session rules today, but — you get to Mark some bonus Sentences. So, again if you work towards a Dream you can Mark a Sentence of your choice. The other one… another one that comes up a lot is: choose one Means that shaped how you play your character but what you did not get to Mark during play in mark it. And so a Sentence like that that is just, like…
Vinny: [overlapping] A utility Sentence? Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …“I'm always using ‘I always find it simple effective solution,’ it doesn't fail that often because I'm using it in kind of low tension scenarios often, so I don't get to mark it” — you still get to mark it at the end of the Sentence… at the end of the session, because it's been a key part of how you play your character.
Vinny: Got it.
Austin: And that sometimes it's not even one where you use it.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: It could be a Sentence just, like, in your mind the whole time…
Vinny: Mm-hm!
Austin: …and is driving how you're making choices. You know? So… In this case I imagine that that's one that will come up inside of Selex’s head a lot.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: Yeah. You're able to wheel off — or, like, hovercart off, maybe —
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …some big crates with some makeshift water filters — or something at least will pass for them for a short amount of time — into the… a sort of receiving bay. Receiving bay that is… has this sort of [chuckles] beautiful Renaissance architecture. There's, like, stained glass facing out into space. You can see the light of the Corpse Sun that, like, dark red light coming through it. It's changed the color of what would have traditionally been very beautiful colors. It's made all the stained glass look kind of sickly and decrepit in some way.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: And there are a pile of boxes, you know, in the corner that's clearly where they receive stuff. And it’s… It seems like it's piling up a little bit. Like, maybe there was another delivery today of stuff that did not get… properly inventoried and taken aboard. And in fact, you don't see anyone else here in the docking bay. It's as if everybody is… You know, normally you would imagine that there's, like… there's at least, like, a nun here to be, like: “Yes! Go put the goods over there!” Or whatever. But that's not happening here. You have free run of the place. There are a couple of doors out um uh that are clearly marked. You know, one of them is leading towards… the guest quarters. One of them is leading, you know, towards the central hub.
[01:00:00]
Austin: And one of them is leading towards the restrooms.
[pause]
Vinny: So… as we're setting this up, and, you know, Selex is doing the, like: [dusts his hand off]
Selex: Okay…!
Vinny: I think he'd go over to… Hard and Floog’artha and be, like:
Selex: So… So, what's the play here? What are we…? What are we after on this one?
Alex: [softly] What are we after on this one?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: We're trying to get onto the big ship. Right? [overlapping] That's the ultimate goal here?
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah, your ultimate goal is…
Alex: [overlapping] So I think Hard would sort of be like…
Austin: …to get there and get all the copper pipes out, so to speak. Right?
Vinny: [laughs]
Brad: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] The good stuff.
Austin: [overlapping] Like, whatever… But they're ancient powerful copper pipes!
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] You know, they don't make copper pipes like this anymore!
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: This is… This is like finding, you know… a ship from a different era where all the ships were built better. [chuckles] You know?
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: A real, like, “they don't make them like this anymore” moment. And also, maybe there's ancient power on that ship. Maybe there's knowledge. Maybe there's something that could help you find where your daughter went [overlapping] for instance, Selex.
Vinny: [overlapping] And…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: I would say Selex also… in this role maybe he feels like this stuff is better served to fix up… to not prop up the See.
Austin: [overlapping] Right.
Vinny: [overlapping] And is better… These materials are much better used to help the people back, who need it. Who's, like, this stuff is failing. And you can't get these materials anymore.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: Like, the systems are falling apart back home and in other places. And this place just wastes them. They use it for, like, you know… tearing the copper out to, like, make ornamental things [overlapping] and whatnot. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] That's exactly that. Yeah. They don't even get the water crystal, so they don't need water filters anymore! If they just got the water crystal…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …they wouldn't need them! You know?
Alex: Yeah.
Vinny: They’re just so wasteful.
Austin: Yeah. I think another important point about this place is, like, it is gilded, the place that you are now. The… What do they call it? The Retroquire. The Retroquire is the space station, and it is, like, gilded and — again — stained glass, and gem-encrusted…
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: …and all the stuff that the church… you know, proselytizes you should remove from your own life. You know? It's okay here, because it's all about the Immaterial One.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: These are…
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] These are taking them away from… the mundane world! And locking them up here — in this beautiful church that only the… [chuckles] you know, the clergy get to live in.
Vinny: [overlapping] So…
Austin: [overlapping] Subtle I am not.
Vinny: [laughs]
Brad: [overlapping] It’s funny how that works.
Alex: [overlapping] It's fair.
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: I'm… I am inclined to briefly check out the guest quarters if it's not too long of a journey. And maybe see who our competition might be.
Austin: Yeah, totally. Um. I think, you know, you… are able to kind of duck down that hallway. And before you… You know, there's, like, doors on the left and the right of a hallway with kind of tiled floor. Kind of a maroon red tile floor, kind of mat. The… One of the doors is open and you can hear a pair of voices speaking. They're a pair of voices that at least somebody in this party knows: they are the voices of Ceria Blood and Carrick Phlegm. They are two of the… I guess, soldiers or… [chuckles] minions of… Creighton Bile — who is an Inquisitor. They're all on your Band sheet. They're the people who you have a couple of the Sentences for already. Um. They are… You know. I don't want to say that they're your nemeses or anything like that.
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: But you've come across them a couple of times — you've… kind of crossed the line into Venerant See space where you've been doing some missions — and so you recognize the voices of Ceria Blood and Carrick Phlegm here. Um… I almost said Floogan. That's a different guy.
Brad: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] That’s a different guy.
Austin: [overlapping] Flugan is completely different. This is Floog’artha.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: Floog’artha, you recognize them and Ceria is complaining. I think she's like:
Austin (as Ceria Blood): I'm sick of being on this forsaken station. There's nothing for anything, like someone like me to do here.
Austin: And Carrick is, like:
Austin (as Carrick Phlegm): Calm down. Take a break. We just have to guard a few pilgrims for a week or two. And then we'll be on our way. Think of it as a vacation.
Austin: And so, you know that they are here. And are here in some sort of official guarding capacity — which is not normally what they do. You're not sure why that's the case, necessarily. But it sounds also like there are some… pilgrims here. A group of pilgrims here. Which maybe answers why there seems like… the station is a little understaffed? Maybe they're dealing with too many people? So, you do overhear that.
Brad: Okay.
Austin: How do you make sure you don't get caught by them as you're sneaking around back here?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: I think one of them is probably going to… Let's see… Let's see if I can actually try to use a Sentence on you. Or if I'm the one who's over… Oh. You know what I think I can actually do is…
Alex: Do you want me to roll for stealth?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Yeah, roll for stealth for me here. No!
Alex: Uh-huh.
Austin: There is a… god. Maybe the two of them don't have it. Maybe only Creighton does. I have to get my notes, one second! [vocalizes] To-do-doo… I have too many things open… Here they are.
Alex: All good.
Austin: Do… Yeah, I think, actually… Yeah. I think that they… You have the drop on them. Neither of them have anything special that would let them ferret you out by themselves. So, maybe an important thing learned here about the two of them. So, yeah. You can kind of move as you will. What do you… What do you do, Floog’artha?
Brad: Um… Am I allowed to ask: “do we fear these minions [overlapping] based on our past experiences, or…?” Hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Up to you. You know, what you've seen… You can see the Sentences that they've used on you… or before. That you've seen them use before. They are… Ceria Blood has “I always wield an unpredictable weapon, my chain-spear.” So you know that she is someone who is a bit of a hand-to-hand combatant. Who focuses on doing the violence of the Venerant See. So I think in a one-on-one fight you might fear her. Whether you fear her in a more… general sense you're not sure. Um… And I guess, actually, maybe — I should have said this as you came to dock — you would have recognized another ship that's here. Which is the Grace of the Dry Well which is Carrick Phlegm's ship. I mean, actually, it's… Inquisitor Bile’s ship. Carrick Phlegm is just the Helmsman of it, obviously. [overlapping] But…
Vinny: [overlapping] It's a really bad ship. [laughs]
Austin: [overlapping] It's really. [chuckles] Exactly. So, yeah. That's actually fun. What if it is… What if it is Bile's kids? What if Ceria Blood and Carrick Phlegm are… Creighton Bile’s kids? Don't worry about the last names.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: It's all just thematic. You know?
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: So, it's like… his son and daughter… and they're kind of having a sibling — you know — bickering… in the guest quarters as you approach.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: So, yeah. What do you do? Having learned this?
Brad: Hmm. Are we able to confer quietly? Without being heard?
Austin: Yeah. Absolute… Uhhh…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] I would say…
Alex: [overlapping] Maybe we walk back a little bit from where they were?
Austin: Exactly. Yes. Within the realm of… a regular person, you know, possibility: yes.
Alex: Yeah.
Brad: My inclination is to quietly back away and leave them be.
Alex: Yeah, I would agree with that. But with the foreknowledge now that they are on the ship and we should try our best to not get, like, right into their field of view.
Brad: Right.
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] Love it
Alex: [overlapping] All right. So… 
Austin: [overlapping] All right.
Alex: …with that information, I assume our next goal is to try and figure out where the port to the giant ship is.
Austin: That seems like a good objective. [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] I think you said there was a… there was another pathway to kind of the main hub?
Austin: Yep. [overlapping] That's exactly right.
Brad: [overlapping] When talking about the docking bay?
Austin: Yeah. Is that… Is that where you're headed? You're headed down [overlapping] that kind of main hub area?
Alex: [overlapping] I think so, yeah.
Austin: Uh. All right. As you take that other hallway. Which is a broader hallway, you know. It's not just, like, the little dorms, [chuckles] basically. But it is a… it's the type of thing that you could wheel a bunch of big crates down.
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: You start to hear the sound of voices… you know, the center of this place is kind of a domed enclosure that… then leads off in different directions to various chapels and, you know, the priests’ quarters and stuff like that. And that's all ahead. In the dome itself is kind of a congregational spot. There's a fountain in the middle. The whole dome is kind of glassed in, so you get the red of the Corpse Sun lighting this whole place. You know… all of the angles are… the shadowed angles are stretched in strange ways because of the way the light of the Corpse Sun is hitting. And the murmuring sound, it's revealed, is coming from what I can only call a gaggle of pilgrims.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: There's a couple dozen pilgrims here who are talking amongst themselves. Most of them are wearing, you know, sackcloth and other simple clothes — but there's a handful of them that are, in fact, wearing… kind of gaudy… a gaudy layer of clothes. And I say a layer, because you actually see one person remove their outer… this fancy outer coat and toss it into the fountain. Where it starts to dissolve revealing the fountain is releasing some sort of acid. Um. And they are, like, going through a… a sort of baptismal removal of wealth in this moment.
Vinny: [overlapping] Hmm.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: They're burning away the layers of… You know. These are maybe not… The real wealth — the diamonds and gems — those get taken to a vault.
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: Your fancy outer layer, you know, coat or whatever…
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: …does get just deposited: one by one, they're, like, lining up and going in. But it's not so organized there's a hush. Like, people are just talking to one another as this is happening.
Vinny: Is there, like… those pool filters? Where all of the coins and stuff sink to the bottom of? [chuckles] 
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. It sinks into the… and then it’s scooped away? [inaudible – 01:09:44]
Vinny: [overlapping] And… [laughs] Yeah. Just gets [imitates mechanical whirring] vrrrrr!
Austin: Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. You're able to at least… start to move through here. I would say you would maybe be under risk — except that you already crossed off the Sentence “Venerant See parishioners are always suspicious informants.”
Vinny: Hm.
Alex: Right.
Austin: So that… They're not going to use that against you as long as you're in kind of the… vague shape of what we call a scene. You know? You could cut scenes slimmer! You could say that walking down the hallway to overhear the other guys was a scene — but I'm kind of playing looser than that today and making sure that we have breadth in how long some of these Sentences get crossed out. So. Yeah. They don't seem… They're so involved in their own stuff that as you walk down this hallway none of them even turn to look at you. They assume that you're part of the group, or are maintenance folks, or something else.
Vinny: So… I have a bigger question. Uh…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: So the Moon Sentences.
Austin: Yeah. Yes.
Vinny: So we are… Are we… Are we on Thrummer? Now?
Alex: [overlapping] We’re attached to it.
Austin: [overlapping] You're close enough to Thrummer that you could add Sentences to…
Brad: [overlapping] Oh.
Austin: Yeah. To the Moon. Or use Sentences to that… to that effect, yeah.
Vinny: Um. And to do that I would have to use my Token?
Austin: You spend a Token to either use one of these established Sentences or to… to add a new one. Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Okay, I got it.
Austin: [overlapping] And use it immediately.
Vinny: Okay. Um…
Austin: Yeah. Tokens can do a few things… Maybe we should have gone over those a little more clearly. One: they can… add and use a Moon Sentence; two: you can use an existent Moon Sentence; three: they can boost the rank of a Means you're using, including a Bond that another character has with you, or the Band Sentence… by 1.
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] So, if you know you're up against a +1 Sentence and you're defending — you're counteracting…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: …and you only have a +0 Sentence — you can spend your Token to boost your Sentence by 1. You know? Here is some of the tactical play. Right? It's, like…
Alex: Right.
Austin: “Do I think I can beat this Sentence or do I need to spend my Token?”
Brad: [overlapping] Do…
Vinny: [overlapping] And then there's… Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Brad.
Brad: Do then the larger Sentences also Realize verbally, as well? Like… they don't just +1…? Do… Do you also kind of add to them? Or…
Austin: The larger, like, the Moon Sentences… [overlapping] and the Faction Sentences?
Brad: [overlapping] Like, the Band Sentence? Yeah. Like, would you…
Austin: [overlapping] I believe Band Sentence… [sighs] I have to double check Band Sentence. I know it's my game. Um…
Brad: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] There’s a lot here.
Austin: [overlapping] I made a decision…
Alex: To be fair.
Austin: There is. I made a decision pretty late on to allow Bonds to Realize in a traditional way. They originally didn't Realize with added Clauses — they instead got rewritten over and over again. And I think instead I decided you can… totally just Realize them, like, regular. I don't quite remember if Band Sentences do, or if they just… I'm trying to find out. Let me find out for you real quick. I guess isn't super… [overlapping] matter in terms of…
Brad: [overlapping] It’s not really pressing right now.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. It's not pressing. But yeah. I think that they do, though.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay..
Vinny: [overlapping] And, and…
Alex: [overlapping] Vinny, was there something you wanted to do?
Vinny: Well… So, then you can… you can also… — I forget what it's called — but you can also…
Austin: [overlapping] So, Trouble. Yes.
Vinny: [overlapping] …cause your character to do something unfortunate to recharge a Token?
Brad: [overlapping] Is that the fourth Sentence…?
Austin: [overlapping] That is correct. You know, you have your Tokens already.
Vinny: Right.
Austin: What did you say, Brad?
Brad: Is that the fourth Sentence, right? That you used to do that? [overlapping] Or… is that…
Austin: [overlapping] You can do any of them! The fourth Sentence tends to be… written such that it's a good candidate for it.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] But you can use any Sentence you want to do it. There's kind of two versions of that. There is Illuminating Failure — which is not the way that you recharge a Token, but — it's a Sentence failing on purpose just so you can mark a Sentence. So if you're at, like, marked…
Vinny: [overlapping] Hmm.
Austin: [overlapping] If you have one that's, like, 2 of 3 and you really want that third mark, so you can level it up, you could just decide once per session: “I'm going to… I'm going to swing and miss on this one. I want this one to fail.” The other thing you could do is do a Tragic Success: which is when one of your Sentences deliberately leads you into Trouble. You can't do that if you're, like, in the middle of a Conflict already. But, like, in a moment like this where it's totally neutral you could say: “Ahhh…! I'm going to invoke a Tragic Success! I'm going to get us deeper into trouble and Mark my Token back.” But right now you have your Token. To be clear.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: So.
Vinny: Okay. And… And just to be clear: the Thrummer is where we're headed.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] We're trying to get inside the Thrummer.
Austin: [overlapping] You’re headed to the Thrummer. Trying to get inside.
Vinny: [overlapping] And it's got some kind of…
Austin: [overlapping] Somewhere in here…
Vinny: …melodic thing that happens. The thrumming.
Austin: I mean, like… I guess I should… I should be emphasizing this: every… you know, 18 seconds you hear [imitates a sustained low sound] haroommmmmmm.
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: [repeats the sound] Haroommmm…
Alex: [overlapping] Like, Tibet throat singing.
Austin: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: And it for, like, a cycle and then it stops. And then it picks back up.
Alex: Okay.
Vinny: Um… Can I… Can I burn my Token to make a Sentence?
Alex: [overlapping] Go on!
Austin: [overlapping] Yes, you…! Always! Yes.
Vinny: All right. I want to try. ‘Cause I just want to try this.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Go for it!
Vinny: Okay. Um… I would like… I'm trying to think of the Sentence. But I would like to add that the pilgrims…
[01:15:01]
Austin: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …venerate the ship.
Austin: Oh…!
Vinny: …and want… every… the thrum calls to them. And they get…
Austin: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …a few get tours. Like, get to… get close to touch the ship and worship on it.
Austin: Uh-huh. “The Thrummer’s Chosen…” How about this? “The Thrummer’s Chosen pilgrims are always allowed access to… to the vessel.” Or something like that.
Vinny: Yes!
Austin: Simple.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] Right.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. Very.
Austin: [overlapping] I love this. This is fantastic. Um… In fact, I think maybe you over… So. Spend your Token. Mark that you've spent it.
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: You used this. I'm not challenging it. This is uncontested. The… You overhear, maybe as this… this ritual of cleansing is happening. Someone in the in the crowd — maybe the lead of the… the lead clergyman of this pilgrimage… who doesn't seem to be from here but has, like, led… this procession here — says, you know:
Austin (as Pilgrimage leader): Yes! Cleanse yourself of all mundane things! We are here in the presence of the Holy voice. Listen to it sing!
Austin: And then [imitates the thrum] harrraammmmm… happens.
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Pilgrimage leader: Who among you will walk with me aboard the vessel?!?
Austin: And is kind of putting out a call to see… you know… trying to figure out who is… who's chosen or who's choosing themselves to go along with him… on this journey.
Alex: I think Hard would raise his hand somewhat… sheepishly. And then he would kind of elbow Floog’artha and Selex. Like: [murmuring emphatically] “Raise your hand! Raise your hands!”
Vinny: [laughs] Uh… Yeah.
Austin: I have a question. I know what… I know what Floog’artha is wearing. But Hard [chuckles] and… Selex, what are you wearing right now?
Alex: Uh…
Austin: Do you have anything this church might think of as being… you know, too gaudy?
Alex: No. Like… Hard Markinson, like I said, space farmboy —
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] …does not dress in particularly gaudy. Like, mostly very workmanlike clothes, I would say.
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: That at most he put on something like… you know, let's just call it the closest equivalent to a hoodie that you would have in this universe.
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: And has the hood up so that he is a little bit more incognito.
Vinny: Like… Overall. Like… Basically, like — what are they called, like, not overalls — but the coveralls. Like, coveralls…
Austin: [overlapping] Yes. Yes.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: Yeah.
Alex: But they don't quite cover all.
Vinny: [laughs] They're, like, a little too tight. He's got… A little too tight, so it's unzipped a little bit, maybe. You know.
Alex: Is there a butt flap?
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: Is the butt flap partially open?
Austin: [chuckles]
Vinny: No! No. [overlapping] These are not long johns.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Vinny: [overlapping] These are these are, like, mechanics’ coveralls.
Austin: [overlapping] Yes.
Vinny: But… But let's just say maybe there's a flap — not quite open —, but it's for a, like, a tube that is… you know, that you would use in some kind of… that you have to put through when you put an outer space suit on?
Austin: [overlapping] Sure. Sure, sure, sure.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. Yea-yea-yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] That would have to seat up. That's kind of ripped and broken. You know?
Austin: Yeah.
Pilgrimage leader: Ah, yes! Yes! My three Brethren who come to me dressed austerely already! Still, you must give to the Fountain. What will you give to the Fountain to show you are Chosen?
Brad: Oh.
Vinny: Oh, man. I… All right.
Alex: Trying to think for a second here.
Vinny: Can I… Can I try to recharge my Token?
Austin: [chuckles] You can always try…!
Vinny: “I always struggle against my roots,” which is my background.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: You know. Of, like, my blue-collar background?
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: And I say:
Selex: Haven't these people given enough? Can't we just see the ship?
Austin: [sighs] Oh, buddy!
Alex: [overlapping] I remember that one.
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, buddy. Yeah, go ahead and rechar… Go ahead and recharge your Token.
Vinny: [laughs]
Pilgrimage leader: None have ever given enough! There is never enough to give! The Immaterial One… he’s the only who has given enough! He gave his very body so that we may have a life. Will you give your body? If not, there is always more to give!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [chuckles] [Laughter]
Alex: [overlapping] All right. Uh…
Pilgrimage leader: [overlapping] I won't allow you to come. You two —
Austin: …nodding at… Floog’artha and Hard —
Pilgrimage leader: …come give to the Fountain. But until this one repents he may not join you.
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Austin: [overlapping] Looking at you, Selex.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Selex kind of stares him down and says:
Selex: Um… There's nothing left to give.
Austin: [chuckles] The… You get a lot of odd looks from the other pilgrims, [overlapping] here. Unsurprisingly. Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] He looks around when he says that, to everyone.
Austin: Yeah. Okay.
Alex: [overlapping] I think…
Brad: [overlapping] Um… I’m not…
Alex: [overlapping] What’s Floog’artha got?
Brad: I'm trying not to rely too much on magic here — although, guess that's kind of my whole thing… [chuckles] [overlapping] Um…
Austin: [overlapping] I mean, you're a witch, yeah.
Brad: Can I reach into the voluminous pocket of my robes and speak some words quietly and conjure a handful of coins?
Austin: Oh, absolutely you can do that!
Brad: [chuckles] [overlapping] Okay. All right.
Austin: [overlapping] Absolutely you can do that. Um…
Brad: “I always know which old words serve my aims,” so I guess I say those words.
Austin: Yeah. Are you… Are you praying to a particular patron deity or a demon or a…
Brad: Oh, boy!
Austin: What is it that you… What type of thing do you draw this power from?
Brad: [overlapping] Um…
Alex: [overlapping] Do you worship the Void? Do you worship a specific god?
Austin: Yeah, those are great questions!
Brad: Um… Whoever the god of Hedonism is, [chuckles] probably… [overlapping] would be a good match.
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, I love it! Yeah.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Yeah. I don't… I don't have a list of this! So, yes. Gilt.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: G-i-l-t, the god of hedonism…
Brad: Okay.
Austin: …is your god.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Is your Patron deity. God is a lowercase g. Who knows…
Vinny: Mm-hm!
Austin: …what it really is! But it is… It is the words of Gilt that you are able to whisper to produce yourself some coins. And, again, these parishioners will not see through you — I've already kind of established that. That they don't have that Sentence available. And you go in and you put your coins in. And then attention turns to you, Hard.
Alex: Uh… I will look to the parishioner, minister, whatever you want to call him, and I will say:
Hard Markinson: I'm a little light on material goods.
Austin: Ehh…
Hard Markinson: Is giving a memory within the qualifications of what you need?
Pilgrimage leader: Yes. Oh…! So burdensome memories are!
Hard Markinson: [overlapping] Indeed.
Pilgrimage leader: [overlapping] So heavy. Give yourself.
Alex: So what I'm going to do is sort of reach into my space wallet and pull out… a photograph of a… let's just say a woman that neither of you have ever seen before…
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: And I'm going to take that photograph and I'm going to throw it into the Fountain.
Austin: Hm. And it eats it.
Vinny: Man…!
Austin: And the… It, yeah, melts away. And — along with a small handful of other folks who have kind of… you know, rent themselves down to barebone rags — the two of you are ushered into another small group. Selex, what's your… what's your play here? Now that you've been disallowed from going across the main gangway into the Grand Vessel?
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh…
Alex: [overlapping] I will just say real quick: as Hard walks away from the fountain he goes over to Selex, like:
Hard Markinson: Repent, motherfucker.
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: [chuckles]
Vinny: Um… So, it's… Who's the person leading him in?
Austin: There's a… There's a… a guy you've never seen before. It's just, like, a low-ranking — I guess, high-ranking enough to have led a mission here, or led a pilgrimage here — but, you know… Maybe the… You could think of this person as, like, the… priest of a particularly… You know, they tithed the highest this quarter. [chuckles]
Vinny: Uh-huh.
Alex: [chuckles]
Austin: And so they got access to go on a little pilgrimage to see some relics and some holy places. I don't have a name on hand for this guy… Let's call him… Deniel. Like, Daniel but with an “e.”
Alex: Okay.
Vinny: So, can I… can I maybe notice a very particular scar, like, under his collar?
Austin: Sure.
Vinny: That is from a group of people who were… in a war? A class war that were taken? That Selex knows?
Austin: Interesting.
Vinny: And they were all marked and scarred? And Selex knows this because he's been around…
Austin: [overlapping] Long enough?
Vinny: [overlapping] …this particular Moon? And he uses “I always remind those in positions of power of their origins.”
Austin: That's really fun.
Vinny: [overlapping] And says…
Alex: [overlapping] That’s good.
Vinny: And says:
Selex: How can you treat those you know who have suffered already like you were treated on the moon of…
Vinny: [overlapping] I don't need Moon [laughs]
Austin: [overlapping] Wherever.
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: Yea-yea-yeah. I gotcha. Yeah. [sighs] Deniel tries to counter this Sentence.
Vinny: [overlapping] Hmmm!
Austin: [overlapping] Using a Sentence called… “I always endure through hazardous territory.”
Vinny: Ohhh.
Austin: I'm reading that very-very broadly.
Vinny: Hmm.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: But it's gonna fail. This is not… Deniel does not succeed here. Uh… I'm going to add Deniel to our NPC list.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Austin: [overlapping] And I'm going to add a +0 Sentence “I always endure through hazardous territory.” I'm going to mark it once. It fails, but because… he was trying to counter you…
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: …it does not get countered. It does not get scratched out… here. You know, you…
Vinny: [overlapping] It can still be used.
Austin: [overlapping] You succeeded, effectively. It… But it's just regularly used. Yeah, exactly.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: Um. I should have clarified your intention here. I'm guessing your intention was to be allowed to come with this group.
Vinny: Um, yeah. I don't have to be friends with him.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] My intention is to basically have him turn a blind eye to me, to realize maybe that I am both uncovering this kind of…
Alex: This history?
Vinny: It's not a dark history. You know he's not ashamed of it.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Creighton Bile [overlapping] But it is a… It is a hard memory.
Austin: Mm-hm.
Vinny: And to kind of reach into his humanity a bit. To find, like: “Hey. I… I know you.” Like…
Austin: Yeah. Yeah. I know you in a way these other people don't know you.
Vinny: Yeah. [overlapping] I know you. Even though…
Austin: [overlapping] I think his eyes go back to you and, like, they quickly scan you to see if you have any similar markings…?
Vinny: Hmm.
Austin: Which, I mean, most of your body is covered in the coveralls, right?
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: But there is a sort of like real recognize real… [overlapping] thing here…?
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Right.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Like, you said you don't have to be friends. But I do think that there is… You instantly have the sense: “Oh, this is a guy who came to this church after whatever scarred him.”
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] You know?
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: He’s thrown himself into this in this way that's very zealous — partly because it was a way of dealing with what came before. You know?
Vinny: Right!
Austin: There's clarity in the Immaterial One, at the very least.
Vinny: And, like, I'm not trying to uh say that I'm faking it — I'm just saying that, like: “Hey, haven't we all given up enough?”
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: “To… To be in the grace of our god?”
Austin: Yeah. And… nods and says:
Deniel, pilgrimage leader: Words understood. Join us. Walk with me as we meet The Inquisitor.
Austin: And, you know, begins a long walk down a wide hallway towards the… You know, there are signs that say, like… “Towards the Holy Chorus” or something like that.
Vinny: [chuckles] Mm-hm.
Austin: [chuckles] Or “Holy Chorus: this way”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: As you walk towards where the thrumming is coming from.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: And in the distance you can see a figure standing by the gangplank. It is Inquisitor Bile.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Oh, boy.
Austin: [overlapping] It is someone who you have run afoul before. Who seems to be the… escort of this group of pilgrims. He has not spotted you quite yet. But you do know that that's what inquisitors do! Inquisitors…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] They inquisite.
Austin: [overlapping] You'll see here, quote: “I always ferret out the rebellious” is the number one Sentence that Creighton Bile has. And it is Primed: it has three marks. It could actually be something different at this point. It could be realized at any point to be something stronger than a +0. You also see that Creighton has “I always intimidate those who share my beliefs or loyalties.” There might be other Sentences, too. I mean, there almost certainly are! [chuckles]
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Alex: [overlapping] We just haven’t run into them yet.
Austin: [overlapping] You know that… You just haven't run into them yet. Exactly. Um. So. As you approach, what do you do? Do you take any sort of action to help yourself be… hidden amongst the wolves, so to speak?
Alex: Yeah. So, a question I have: are we the only ones being led to the…
Austin: Nah. I think there's a group of eight of you total. Or maybe more. Maybe let's say ten. Ten of the… you know, couple dozen, few dozen…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Say there were thirty-six people back in the big, kind of rounded room —
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] …and here there's probably ten of them, of which you make up three.
Alex: Okay.
Brad: Am I able to in… Am I able to invoke my shelter to disguise our identities?
Vinny: Hm!
Austin: That's very fun! That's a really nice broad use of it. What do you… What's that look like, visually?
Brad: [overlapping] Oh gosh…
Austin: [overlapping] Imagine the camera's on…
Brad: Oh god. Yeah, I was going to say we've already been seen, so… [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] You’re among people, right?
Brad: [overlapping] …changing what we look like right now…
Austin: [overlapping] I mean, I don't know.
Brad: [overlapping] Right. Might not be up to… Hmmm…
Austin: [overlapping] Maybe there's some sort of spell that clouds minds or something.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] But you can tell me. You know?
Brad: Ahh… Yeah… But I mean, I guess I am… I guess I'm allowed to know which Sentences he has and what level they are, right?
Austin: You're allowed to know… what they are… the ones that you've run into already, at least. Right?
Brad: Anything… Like, anything that's on the sheet my character has knowledge of, right?
Austin: That is correct. A hundred percent.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: Anything that's already on the sheet. Yes.
Brad: Okay. [overlapping] ‘Cause that's… That is a…
Austin: [overlapping] You know, for instance…
[pause]
Austin: That… that first one…
Brad: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] …could counter that +0 Sentence.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Even without being Realized. Right?
Brad: That's exact… That's exactly… That's a +0 Sentence so I'm not actually confident in success here.
Austin: You do have a Token, which could boost it to a +1. Now, he also has a Sentence that's Primed: he could decide to Realize it to make it a +1 and beat your… Token. Though! He would have to decide that before he uses the Sentence. Right? He doesn't get to change it in the middle of… You know, if he says “’I always ferret out the rebellious’ +0 Sentence”… then you go: “Aha! I'm going to boost my thing by +1.” He doesn't then get to go: “But actually…!”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: “…it wasn't a +0 Sentence! It's a +1 Sentence.”
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Brad: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] Once he uses it he's locked into using it. You know?
Alex: Okay.
Brad: Okay.
Austin: So you could kind of play a little game here. So… You know, there's a… Not a real rule but there's a sort of… One of the first things I wrote for Realis was this little thing at the very top of the game…
[01:30:02]
Austin: …that is, like, a tonal set of rules or truths. It says:
“This universe prizes passivity except after wisdom gained. Recognizes friendship’s strength but rewards solitary achievement. Shifts in scope and scale according to the needs of the story or the whims of its tellers. Demands honesty in consequences but care at the table. Is an inverted twilight mirage; psychedelic space and sword and sorcery; mumbling mystics at the castle observatory; meteors cleaved clean with broadswords; a thousand moons in fatal orbit with an unreachable world called Realis.”
And that first bit “prizes passivity except after wisdom gained” means sometimes it's better to just wait and see what happens. Because as the counteractor you are in a prized position. You're in a privileged position. Waiting for someone to take an action and then you being the person who, like, flips them with their own momentum is stronger than taking the swing yourself. This is of course one of the things I think will be most houseruled and flipped and, like, hacked in the game…
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] …is, like, “Well, what about a world where actors have the advantage and you swing harder if you swing first?” I think that's a really fun way to hack the game. But in this case I think you've done the right thing, which is you've said “Wait a second. If I… you know, hide ourselves first and I'm the actor I've put ourselves maybe in harm's way, at risk, as this guy sees us.” So, maybe just playing it calm and collected is the right play.
Brad: Right. Because he… only has to equal the value of my Sentence to beat it, right?
Austin: If he's defending it…
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …if he's countering it. Exactly.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Whereas…
Brad: Okay.
Austin: …you only have to equal it to beat his if he's the one acting on you.
Brad: Right.
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: Okay. Yeah. Then maybe I… hold my Sentence in reserve and see what happens.
Austin: Yeah. Sounds good.
Vinny: Do… Hard and Selex know this guy? This…
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Do we all know him?
Austin: [overlapping] I think you've all, in some… This is a guy who's… I think he's the Inquisitor for this sector of…
Vinny: Hmm!
Austin: …of Realis. Right?
Alex: Right.
Austin: I think that he is… explicitly assigned to ferret out the rebellious and the… the heretical here, in the kind of… the scrap sector or whatever this is. Where there's all these old derelict space hulks and stuff. You know?
Vinny: So as much as we know the Venerant See, we know this person because… [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] This person… Yes. Exactly that. Yeah.
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: And not just by reputation! You've at least encountered him in some way… you can define what that is! You know, if you want this to be a guy that you've run across over and over again and you have a sort of… a truce but… a shaky one — that's fine. But if you want instead… You know, I think… In my mind he's a guy you've slipped past a few times, or gotten one over a few times.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Hence knowing a few of his Sentences.
Alex: I mean, the thing I was thinking was that — and, you know, feel free to tell me if you have a different idea — but, like, the idea I had was that he might know our ship better than he would know us.
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, that's really good! I like that a lot!
Alex: [overlapping] Like, he would’ve seen… He would have seen our ship; he would have seen us escape him at various times — like, maybe when we were on some kind of, like, scrap run or something we shouldn't have been doing…
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: But he wouldn't have necessarily seen our faces.
Brad: [overlapping] [inaudible – 01:33:14]
Austin: [overlapping] I think that's a great… I love that.
Brad: Getting a little bit of an Elmer Fudd kind of vibe from this guy. [chuckles]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Like, if Elmer Fudd could…
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, nooo…! Poor Creighton Bile…!
Alex: …could, you know, could basically, like, order executions. Yes.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] Uh-huh. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Inquisitor Fudd.
Vinny: Inquisitor Fudd.
Austin: [chuckles] Inquisitor… Yeah. Yes.
Austin (as Creighton Bile): Hurry up! Hurry up!
Austin: You hear him say as… the group gets closer and closer. Um… And then you hear from behind you the footsteps of Ceria and Carrick, the — who, now decideD are his children…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …and also his kind of enforcers — joining you and kind of framing the group in the… He's in the front and they're in the back. And… Yeah. I think he's, like:
Creighton Bile: A single line, please!
Austin: And… bit by bit each of the pilgrims kind of gets into a single line. And here is where… he will try to use the Sentence “I always ferret out to the rebellious.” He is not Primed… Or, he is not… Realizing it. He is leaving it at +0. Um… I've also realized I have another mechanic to tell you.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: But let's… let's do this first! And then we'll get to the other mechanic. Yeah. He's, like:
Creighton Bile: Name?
Austin: And you know…
Creighton Bile: Name, qualification?
Austin: To each person who comes up. And, you know, someone will be, like, you know:
Pilgrim: Jeremy… Deadstar. Uh… I saw a miracle on the hill and donated my… my business, the… the Wrench Factory to the church.
Austin: So, it's, like, a bunch of… you know, fairly wealthy people here who've made some sort of huge donation in the last year… and who have some claim to, you know, having some sort of holy interaction or some vision or some dream that led them here — is what they're telling him as he… as they approach. And he is using “I always ferret out the rebellious” to try to make sure that everyone who was coming aboard… or with him on this trip is some sort of true believer.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Brad: [overlapping] I…
Austin: [overlapping] Does anyone have a Sentence that could counter that? His intention is to identify, you know…
Alex: Yeah
Austin: …wolves in the flock, so to speak.
Brad: Yeah. Can I — real quick, as we line up — can I ensure that I get in the front of the three of us?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: Yeah. [overlapping] You want be the first one? Totally.
Austin: [overlapping] That works. [inaudible – 01:35:34]
Brad: Yeah. Hm… Is now the time to invoke the shelter?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: He is… he is using a Sentence. So you would be countering. Yeah.
Brad: Yeah.
Alex: I…
Brad: Okay.
Alex: I have an alternate idea that if you aren't sure about the one you want to do. [overlapping] It's up to you.
Brad: [overlapping] What do you got?
Alex: But the other… The one I have, which — this is a slightly different interpretation, I think, as from what, you know, was potentially intended, but it might work here — is that “I always find the way through or around as long as I can orient myself to a single landmark.” Now. That is intended as more of a navigational thing. But!
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: What if the… by seeing this person as the landmark — and I see him as, like, the obstacle to get around — I can potentially intuitively figure out what it is I need to say to convince this person that I am genuine.
Austin: Yeah. I'll allow it. But I also think something's interesting here if you do want to go that route.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Which is you'd be kind of setting him up as a landmark going forward — meaning…
Alex: Right.
Austin: …if you lose sight of him… that's like losing sight of a landmark. You know?
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] Now, you might be able to find other landmarks. The bell tower inside might be a landmark, too. But… he is… Although, it is a single landmark. I think you'd be declaring him your landmark if that makes sense. I know you written single the other way here, and I think in a different circumstance I'd allow it. But I think that there's a sort of focus coming into being if you want to do that.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Otherwise, let's do Brad's idea of…
Vinny: Shelter?
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: …shelter. Which seems like it'll work [overlapping] based on what we know now.
Alex: [overlapping] I… I’m… I'm completely fine with going Brad's idea. I just wanted to float that.
Austin: I love it. It's a really fun… Both of those are great ideas. [overlapping] Either way.
Brad: [overlapping] Uh…
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Brad: Okay, sure. Let's say when I'm two or three people away from the front of the line I attempt to touch his mind and… Erasing any memory of our existence maybe seems a little ambitious…!
Austin: Eh! You know! Maybe. But what do you… I guess my question would be what are you giving him… [sighs] What sort of… lie are you putting up? What sort of mind trick are you giving him that makes him think that you are part of the group [overlapping] in some way? That you're acceptable, you know?
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah…
Brad: [overlapping] Am I able… Am I able to just alter his perception of what we look like and sound like?
Austin: I think that's pretty good, yeah. What's that… What do you… What do you alter it to? What do you start looking and sounding like in his mind?
Brad: Is there… any real commonality between these other pilgrims that we could emulate?
Austin: [sighs] The thing that they didn't get rid of is their nice haircuts. [chuckles]
Brad: [chuckles] Huh.
Austin: They all have a sort of… You know. There's a sort of haircut, isn't there?
Vinny: Mm-hm…!
Austin: [chuckles] You know?
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] Or maybe there's a set of sorts of haircuts where you're, like… “Oh wow, like, you… Yeah, your hair is did.” You know what I mean?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Like, you're not just… [overlapping] You didn’t just get up and…
Brad: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: …you know… comb it today. You went to a salon. You went to a special place. Or even maybe there's a particular one for believers. You know, maybe they all have [overlapping] a very particular type of ponytail.
Alex: [overlapping] Prince valiant.
Austin: Particular… Sorry, one more time?
Alex: The prince valiant haircut.
Austin: Yeah. [chuckles] They have the prince valiant haircut! Exactly.
Alex: Yes.
Austin: Yes. Do you then project that on to yourselves [overlapping] as this guy sees you all…
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …with the little mopish… Yeah. Amazing.
Brad: Yeah. I… I put some… some kind of prim and hoity-toity hairs on us to…
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: …give the impression that we are… I don't know…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] …let's say we are moneyed people looking to liberate ourselves of material interest.
Austin: Love it. Love it. What do you tell him when you approach, then? He says:
Creighton Bile: Name and qualification?
Brad: Oh gosh. So I can't give him my real name, can I? [chuckles]
Austin: Probably! Probably not a great idea, Floog’artha.
Alex: Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] I don't know how far your name travels…
Vinny: [laughs]
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: …but it's quite a name. A memorable one.
Brad: Okay. Um… Man. Uh. I give him the name of… Eustace… Fliprock.
Creighton Bile: Eustace Fliprock. Of course. What of the Immaterial One have you seen?
Brad: Uh… Gosh.
Floog’artha: Nothing, for he is immaterial.
Brad: [chuckles]
Creighton Bile: Ahhh!
Vinny: [laughs]
Creighton Bile: Correct! Come this way and bring your two attendants!
Austin: Because of… You're wearing the long robes, and the two of them are wearing, like, coveralls and beat-to-shit sweatshirt…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: …I think he's assumed that the two of you are his attendants. You know?
Vinny: Hm.
Alex: Yes.
Austin: And he would never deny… that whatever you've worked out with the head pilgrim guy, like, he's fine with all that. So.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Creighton Bile: [overlapping] Right this way.
Austin: [overlapping] And, you know, leads you over…
Alex: [overlapping] Hard immediately clocks this and starts acting like a servant.
Austin: [chuckles] Yeah. And… you know, again you hear [imitates thrumming] haraammmm, haarammm from inside. And the group of you… the seven other pilgrims, the inquisitor and his two kids [chuckles] begin making your way across the gangplank…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …and into the belly of the beast. Towards the… the Thrummer.
Alex: Hell yeah.
Austin: Are you all good to keep going? You want to take a quick break? Do you need anything else? Are we… are we good to roll?
Brad: [overlapping] I could go to the bathroom.
Alex: [overlapping] I mean, if we want to do an intermission, now would probably be the time to do it.
Brad: Yeah.
Austin: That's what I was thinking.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] If we do want to do an intermission in the… you know, instead of, like, being in the middle of something else. But…!
Vinny: Hmm…!
Austin: Also happy to just keep rolling.
Alex: I wouldn't mind just, like, five minutes to run to the bathroom and grab some water, [overlapping] and then we can just come back.
Austin: [overlapping] That’s good.
Vinny: Okay. Then we're going to take a quick intermission here. We'll be back in just a minute or two. I'm going to take it over to this beautiful artwork and attempt to mute all the microphones. I'm going to do that first to make sure…
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …it doesn't get everybody… Muted. Muted. Muted. Everybody say… hello! Yep, great! Fantastic. All right, folks! We'll be back in just a minute. Bye.
[pause]
Vinny: [whispers] And we are back. [in a regular tone] Hello.
Austin: Hello.
Alex: Hi. Hi.
Brad: Hello.
Austin: Hi. [overlapping] We’re back.
Brad: [overlapping] Austin, for those who have just joined us you want to give a quick summary of what we're doing and how they can participate if they want?
Austin: Yeah! Absolutely. We are playing a game of Realis — which is the tabletop RPG that I've been working on for the last few years as a side project — that is now available for purchase: if you go to itch.io and do a search for Realis, R-e-a-l-i-s you'll find it. It's on my page thecalcutec.itch.io. It is 15 bucks for a pretty hefty PDF. I think it's, like, 130 pages or something like that?
Alex: Oh, it's very hefty.
Austin: It's very hefty. It currently doesn't have bookmarks. But it will by this time next week.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: We've been collecting typos and making sure all those are taken care of and then once Tyler — who is the publisher of the book uh through the… Tyler has a small games press called Possible Worlds Games (which is fantastic) — Tyler's been handling all the layout and all the typo fixes and stuff like that. Once all that's kind of set, which it's just about now, I'm going to go through and add bookmarks — which will make reading it a lot easier. I think. Even for me.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Yeah. There's a pinned message in the chat currently with the…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: …with the link. Also if you want to hear more Realis, right now over on Friendsatthetable.net… we are playing through a kind of playtest… you know — from a year ago we started recording, maybe longer — campaign of it. The first, I think, four episodes of that campaign will be for free. It'll be on the main feed. And then the rest of it will come out over the next, like, year or so on our patreon, which is friendsatthetable.cash. So if you want more of it after this you can go there or buy and play your own games.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: I think that's always… Excuse me. That's always the most fun! That's where you'll make it yours. That's where you’ll make it yours. That’s where you’ll turn it into something that you love. So go check that out! Um. What we've been doing so far is… the three of you are a group of space investigators, slash salvagers, slash antiquarians and archaeologists and… I mean, more specifically you're a sort of spaceship captain a Xenagogue; a…
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: …a witch; and a goodfisher — which is sort of, like, a laborer. And in your case, Vinny, you've kind of opted for, like, electrician.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: You know? But, you know. You're kind of also an odd job man, I guess. Right?
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. I’m a handyman. Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] “I always find a simple but effective solution” is very broad. So…
Alex: A Swiss army knife.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: Yeah. Exactly. Swiss Army Knife Man. Um… And you're going into the heart of a grand ancient spaceship called the Thrummer. Or at least that's what people call it because of the strange thrumming sound it releases. It's actually designation Derelict 383 Black Demerit. And you're currently walking across [chuckles] a enclosed gangway, being led by an inquisitor — who has been mind-tricked [chuckles] by the witch into thinking that you're members of the…
[01:45:02]
Austin: …attending pilgrims — and who was also being kind of shepherded by a pair of… you know, evil church minions in the… part of Ceria Blood and Carrick Phlegm.
Vinny: Do we know they’re evil?
Austin: I guess we don't know they're evil. We know…
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh-huh.
Austin: [overlapping] …that you overheard Ceria Blood being like “I don't get to kill anybody right now! Nyeehhh!”
Vinny: Yeah.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Yeah, exactly. And there's a small… Again, there's a group of seven other pilgrims who are with you uh on the… kind of group that is being led aboard. Um… including Deniel, the leader — who, I guess, Vinny you've identified as someone who lived through some old war…
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: …and has gone to the church afterwards —; and a number of other Rich folks who seem uh to have thrown off enough of their worldly goods to be allowed on this… pilgrimage. Um. What was the… Let me think. What's the… Where’re we coming in?
We're coming in with you coming through the gangway. And coming to view what Floog’artha saw earlier. Which was… it really does look like a seaside village. And you come into… off the gangway and onto a long wooden walkway — that has no banisters or anything to the left and right and just falls for miles and miles until it reaches, like, the bottom of the hole of this Grand Vessel. You know? It's, like, looking down into space, effectively. But an enclosed space. Like, there's a wall that just goes and goes and goes.
And if you walk [chuckles] carefully down this gang way eventually you get to what looks like almost a false shoreside — like, there's literally a sort of, like… almost, like, a beach um that's kind of being supported on beams um and then these kind of walkways up to the beach, or these these kind of, like, docks. And in here right now you can see that there's, you know, there's hundreds of these little docking… bays. And there's one other ship that's docked here… Except, it's not really even a ship. It's an Orphan Vessel — or something the size of an Orphan Vessel — that has been so picked clean that it literally looks like fish bones.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] There's nothing on it anymore except the bones themselves. Which maybe have some value! But are, like, [chuckles] really hard…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: …to, you know, transport. Especially, by hand. And especially by this single wooden walkway [chuckles] across a mile of nothing as you walk, you know, through the empty space before you reach the little village inside.
Alex: Okay.
Brad: [overlapping] Uh… Do…
Austin: [overlapping] Anyone’s doing anything dangerous while on this? Go ahead.
Alex: No.
Brad: Do you mean… Do you mean that the ship is a literal fish skeleton? [overlapping] Or it just looks skeletal… but it’s still technological in origin?
Austin: [overlapping] It… It looks… [hemming and hawing] Ehhh… Ah…
Alex: [overlapping] Like, it's really it's just, like, the joints and the framework and everything else has gone?
Austin: Ehhh… It's hard to tell from this distance.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay. Okay! Hm…
Austin: [overlapping] Where does organic and mechanical… where's the line between the two of them?
Brad: [overlapping] Sure. Sure.
Austin: [overlapping] You're, like, a mile away from it so it's hard to get a closeup view
Brad: [overlapping] Okay. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] But it does look like a fish!
Vinny: [overlapping] Ahhh, man…!
Austin: Like, it does have that… look to it.
Vinny: [overlapping] But…
Austin: [overlapping] It's, like, a spine and then some…
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] …you know… a rib cage, almost. But yeah. Maybe there is some sort of, you know… Hard, you pilot one of these things.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] You can be, like: “Oh, I see where the cockpit would be. I see where the engine would be. I get based on the widths of this stuff that that was a vessel not too unlike mine…”
Alex: Okay.
Austin: “And it has been picked clean.” So…
Alex: So Hard has two questions here [overlapping] for the larger universe.
Austin: [overlapping] Yes. Yes.
Alex: One is: when I am glancing toward that skeleton of the ship is there any kind of incandescent light coming off of it at all? Or is it… [overlapping] does it seem, you know…
Austin: [overlapping] Ohh! Interesting question.
Alex: …in his mental terms completely dead?
Vinny: Hmm.
Austin: Interesting. It… seems dead. [overlapping] It does seem dead.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay. Okay. The other thing I would ask — you said we had never seen a particular configuration for a ship like this before, right?
Austin: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Alex: Like, the seaside village and all that kind of stuff. [overlapping] Does this seem like…
Austin: [overlapping] A hundred percent.
Alex: Does this seem like something that was added decades if not centuries after the thing had already become derelict? Maybe people had put it there?
Austin: [overlapping] No.
Alex: [overlapping] Or does it look like it is part and parcel with the design of this area?
Austin: Um. It looks part and parcel. It looks like…
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Now that you're here, and you can see with your own eyes… You know, imagine a town on a hill that's been built, like, two or three tiers up. There's a big belltower in the middle… There are uh kind of… [chuckles] It's hard to imagine this, because you're inside of a ship. Right? But the ship is huge inside.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] The ship goes up…! There's a ceiling… you know, 500-600 ft above you. You know?
Alex: Right.
Austin: Which means there's another deck above you. But… all around the town — sort of this village — are, like, rolling metal hills then go up until they hit walls. You know?
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Including the kind of back wall, the sidewalls here. Some of those have little doors that, apparently — or big doors — that lead into other parts of this Grand Vessel, the Thrummer. Or they… in one case behind the belltower…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: …maybe. You can't quite see this yet. But maybe — you know, I'll take some… liberty here —
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] …the camera rises as you're walking this wooden plank. And you can see that behind the village is a chasm. It's… As if it's, like, on the side of the Grand Canyon.
Vinny: Hmm!
Alex: Okay.
Austin: And then across the chasm is a wall. And on that wall is a huge bridge — like, a drawbridge — that's blocking some sort of… some sort of doorway. You know?
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] It's as… The drawbridge is as big as…
Alex: [overlapping] So the bridge is up.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: The drawbridge is up. Exactly.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Across this kind of internal… We're really in, like, Destiny: Taken King-ass ship interior. [overlapping] Do you know what I mean?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah. I know this language. Absolutely.
Austin: [overlapping] It is just, like: “I don’t know, man! Why is there an abyss below me? Why is there a drawbridge in here? Like…”
Vinny: [overlapping] So this is all inside the ship?
Austin: [overlapping] That’s what’s going on.
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] You're all inside the ship.
Vinny: Okay. [overlapping] Yeah-yeah. Yeah-yeah. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] The ship is huge! The ship is bigger than… The ship is… I mean, it's a Moon Sentence, right?
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] It has Moon Sentences — it's as big as some small moons are.
Vinny: [overlapping] Got it. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] You know?
Alex: Okay.
Brad: Is there… Is there a body of water by this beach or is it just empty space?
Austin: It is empty. It's nothing. Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay. Let me…
Austin: [overlapping] A hundred percent empty. It's, like… you could imagine the Orphan Vessels coming in to dock as if there were a layer of water… and everything is on that sort of horizontal axis. They're not building in three dimensions on this thing. You know what I mean?
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] It's not… There's not a second village underneath the first Village. It kind of instead… You know, underneath the village kind of curves and goes down, as if there's, like, a foundation underneath it — does that make some sense?
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Does that… You kind of get what I mean? Like, a curve, you know?
Alex: If I may add on to… Floog’artha's question Sentence: does it look like there was ever water there?
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, interesting!
Alex: [overlapping] Is anything rusted? Does anything look like it has been touched by something other than the void?
Austin: The answer to that is: absolutely.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] But it's not that there's water missing; it's that there are, as you approach, you start to pick up scorch marks, damage to the building…
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: …to the buildings, rather; scorch marks against that underside kind of hull of this deck.
Alex: Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: And those sort of look like… I mean we've already said now that Selex you've been in war — at least you know people who've been in war — this looks like some sort of the ruins of an ancient battle. Or the remnants of some ancient battle.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: The village itself looks like it's been taken care of as best as possible, probably by this church.
Alex: Right.
Austin: Or taken care of in the sense that the easy to access bits that had fallen off have all been, you know, scavenged up by people…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: And it doesn't look like there was a fight here recently. But it's like going to the site of an ancient battle.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] You know, or something like that. There are still some scorch marks and still some… you know, some of the buildings have… been broken in half — presumably by some siege weapon or something. But all of the rubble has cleared away at this point.
Alex: So if this was, like, a natural environment we would be finding, like, cannonballs underneath the grass that had overgrown. Or that kind of thing.
Austin: That's exactly right.
Alex: [overlapping] Got it. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] That's exactly the vibe. Yeah. Yeah.
Vinny: But nobody lives here.
Austin: [overlapping] Well… Hm… Well, who’s a…
Vinny: [overlapping] We're the only people that are… I mean, that’s it?
Alex: [overlapping] Nobody that we can see…?
Austin: [overlapping] No body…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: No body live… No… No human… Ah!
Vinny: Ummmm?
Austin: Umm?
Alex: Ummm?
Austin: No one lives here…!
Vinny: [chuckles] Okay. Okay. [overlapping] This isn't a colonized…
Austin: [overlapping] As you get to… Correct.
Alex: [overlapping] It is not occupado.
Austin: [overlapping] Well…!
Vinny: [overlapping] Nobody’s paying taxes.
Austin: Yeah, nobody's paying taxes here! [overlapping] There we go.
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] Got it, got it.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay, got it.
Austin: I guess… here's the thing: you know — because you have the Moon Sentence “The Thrummer scavengers always trade salvage for supplies” — that there are people who come here as scavengers. Both people like you, but also maybe more long-term scavengers, who, you know… the way the corpse of a whale will wash ashore and then become home to a whole ecology for a month or two as, you know, first scavenger animals come and you know eat the corpse; and then inside the bones will grow, you know, strange… plant life or whatever — that style of thing does happen in vessels and derelicts like this. So, there are some… There are probably people aboard somewhere here. Right?
Vinny: Okay.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: There are also always… Like I said before, when Floog’artha was kind of scanning this place with his mind… there is some sort of… some degree of maybe wildlife here? He got the sense that there were, like, creatures aboard. In terms of the living things. Those… seem to be what would be here. Yeah.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: And as you approach you can hear the thrumming, again. Except this time, as now you're aboard the vessel, you can hear it slightly more clearly. Again, before it was just, like, [imitates low resonant tone] harooommmm-adoommm-adoommm. But now you can make out words. And it's:
Thrumming: [with low resonance] Around. A ruin. Rune. Run. Round. Ruin. Rune. Run.
Austin: Over and over again. Which is… weird.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Because that certainly doesn't sound like sort of any sort of holy catechism or hymnal. Or hymn that the Venerant See would particularly worship. But nevertheless, the other pilgrims with you are, like: [whispers] “Oh, yes! The words of the Immaterial One…” [chuckles] 
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: “…echoing through space.”
Vinny: Oh wow. Huh. Um…
Austin: And you come ashore. You come… You come to safe territory. I'm not going to have the wind blow you off into the abyss.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Thank you
Austin: [overlapping] You’ve made it… all right territory. And…
Vinny: [overlapping] Is there wind in here?
Austin: Um. There is a soft wind in here. Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Whaaa…?!?
Austin: [overlapping] There is. Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Is it a constant?
Austin: [overlapping] It is a bit weird. And it's coming… No, it's coming in gusts from whatever is behind that big drawbridge. It's coming not from a shore but almost, like, inland.
Vinny: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] If that makes sense. And…
Vinny: [overlapping] Selex is definitely going to point that out because that's weird for…
Alex: Yeah.
Vinny: …in a spaceship. You know it's like when you hear water draining, and you're, like, “water shouldn't be draining from… there's a drain on the floor.” Like, you know… “Do you feel that?”
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yes.
Selex: [overlapping] You guys feel that?
Hard Markinson: Oh, I feel it, brother!
Selex: [laughs] No, the wind. [chuckles]
Hard Markinson: Yeah, no. I feel that, too.
Austin: [chuckles] Um… Creighton Bile leads you to a little plaza on the… kind of first level of this… kind of three-tiered town. I guess the second level. The first level is, like, the docks and the fake beach; and the second level is kind of, like, low… clay houses; and then the third level is, like, up at the top of the hill where there is the belltower and other stuff.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] So on the second level there's a little plaza. And Creighton Bile says, you know:
Creighton Bile: We will stand here and listen to the voice of the Immaterial One. After that… you'll have one hour to worship as you will.
Vinny: Hmm…
Austin: And… there's, like, an expectation of silence and the chanting comes back through one more time. And you realize the chanting is coming from behind the… the bridge. The far drawbridge. Again, like, imagine you're you're kind of at the bottom of… or the middle of a of a hill; and above that hill is the Grand Canyon; and then on the other side of the Grand Canyon is a wall, except in the wall is something… you know, the size of… the Capitol Building in width that is a drawbridge. [overlapping] And then, you know, hundreds of feet tall.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: And then behind that is where that thrum is coming from. That chant. Or… is a voice coming from behind that. And that is also where the breeze is coming from. And you you maybe realize this now, Selex: it's coming with the same rhythm as the chant is. 
Vinny: Hmm!
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Like someone's breath, almost.
Austin: Exactly. Yeah.
Alex: Okay. So, last question… just is sort of a procedural thing about what we're seeing here:
Austin: Yes.
Alex: Does any of the architecture around here seem in-line with the sheer scope and size of that drawbridge? Like, does that thing seem, like, astronomically larger than any of, like, sort of, like, the buildings and living spaces around here?
Austin: It is impossibly large…
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: So, like, you know, you're not in a Giants Village, right?
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] But the… stonework, or the metalwork that's part of it is recognizable from the village. Right? So…
Alex: Okay.
Austin: You know. [overlapping] I would imagine most of the…
Alex: [overlapping] Same materials.
Austin: The materials are the same.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: The construction… And it's not, like, the church’s stuff, at all! Right? We are in, like… I described before as being kind of a Renaissance-y style. I guess, you know, rococo-maybe style Church.
Alex: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: [overlapping] Here, we are in, like, low Gothic. We are in, you know… There's buttresses and there's vaults and stuff. And… harder edges than what was in the church space station. Nothing here is gilded. Nothing here is as… [chuckles] shiny and built for… Not that there isn't an aestheticism. Not that there isn't some sort of… some element of… beauty being built into these things from whoever built them. But it's a completely different set than the sort of grandiose nature of the Retroquire — which is the station that you were… that you were at before.
Alex: Got it. Okay. While we are observing the silence…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Uh-huh.
Alex: [overlapping] …which Hard will do with the best he can while fidgeting around.
Austin: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Alex: He is going to keep an eye in the direction of the giant drawbridge, looking for something that resembles a device or a structure where there might be some kind of control for that thing.
[02:00:07]
Austin: You don't even need to give me a Sentence here because this isn't uncertain. It's certain there's nothing that you can see.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay. Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] Not… Not with your eyes — maybe not with any eyes — that seem like they'd be connected to being able to open it. From here, at least.
Alex: Got it.
Austin: That seems to be the case, at least.
Brad: [overlapping] Um…
Alex: [overlapping] I will whisper that to my crewmates.
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: Would you… Would you describe this derelict as being of Realis?
Austin: Um…! Interesting! What… Give me… What are you angling for here?
Brad: I'm wondering…
Austin: [overlapping] See…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] I'm wondering if I can “let the nature of Realis take control of my mind” to see if I can divine any meaning from this chant.
Austin: [overlapping] Yes. Absolutely.
Alex: [overlapping] I love that.
Brad: [overlapping] And I wonder… I wonder if the derelict is…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Brad: you know, of an earlier era of this reality [overlapping] such a…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. This is a perfect use of that Sentence.
Alex: [overlapping] Beautiful.
Austin: So your intent is to learn something about this in that way. [overlapping] Yeah. A hundred percent.
Brad: [overlapping] Specifically those words. Yeah.
Austin: Let me see. Let me see if… if anything tries to counter you on this. Um…
Brad: Uh-oh.
Austin: [overlapping] I mean, this is it…
Alex: [overlapping] There’s always a chance, right?
Austin: Uh-huh. Okay. So everyone is praying in the… this kind of central plaza. What's this look like while you're doing this? How does… How do you let it take control, again? What's the camera show? Is it a facial thing? [overlapping] Is there an aura?
Brad: [overlapping] Hmm…
Austin: Is there something else?
Brad: Um… Yeah. Glassy, distant look in the eyes…
Austin: I love that.
Brad: Uh… It's very tempting to say “no change at all!” But…
Austin: No, no, no. I… [overlapping] That sounds good to me!
Brad: [overlapping] Let’s… Let’s… say I'm completely unaware of my surroundings for the duration. So…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. I'm going to…
Brad: [overlapping] If anything… If anything bad happens I might be in trouble.
Austin: Yeah. Well, I mean something fun is happening here — which is that… you're going to get what you want but not quite the way you want it.
Brad: All right. [chuckles]
Alex: I love it.
Austin: So. You are reaching back. You are opening your mind — as they say over in the game Apocalypse World to the Psychic Maelstrom — and… I'm going to tell you right now: you should counter that Sentence. Something is about to counter that Sentence.
Brad: [overlapping] Hm! Okay!
Austin: [overlapping] So go ahead and use the strikeout tool on it and then Mark it. Click the boxes.
Brad: Okay!
Austin: You get flashes in your mind of an earlier time here. There are bodies walking around, people walking around the shore, loading and unloading something from the… from the ships that are arriving. Um. You can hear the bell being tolled, which both opens the outside aperture and lowers the drawbridge. You see that happen… at the same time. So those two things seem to be connected. It's like the aperture opens and the drawbridge opens at the same time — which suggests there's maybe some connection between those two those two operations. Um… 
And then you notice… you notice two things. One is in the vision and one is in reality. The vision reveals that there is something wrong with these people. They don't have faces. There is an oval shaped hole or absence where their faces should be. [overlapping] Some of them wear, like, a plate.
Alex: [overlapping] Oh dear.
Austin: Like, a sort of an… Almost like they're covering the hole in their face, like, aesthetically? You know what I mean? Like, almost wearing, like, an eye patch and, like, a cool design on it [overlapping] but for their whole head. And it’s all…
Brad: [overlapping] Okay. And not just… Not just a gap in my perception, but physically… whatever…?
Austin: [overlapping] Physically, they are absent. There's a round… absence in their head. And then… the second thing… They're doing that. The second thing that you notice is in this time — it's now — when you reached back like that, you sort of open something up.
Brad: [overlapping] Oh…
Austin: [overlapping] I'm adding a new Faction to the Band and World list. They are called: The Rune or The Roun, depending on how you want to talk about them. And they have a Sentence: “Rune Spirits always possess the oldest thing in a room.”
Brad: Hmmm!
Austin: That fish skeleton shakes to life.
Brad: [chuckles] [overlapping] Oh, boy!
Austin: [overlapping] And begins to undock from the station. And… begins to, like, hover around and it emits a loud growl. From a distance you hear your own Orphan Vessel, Hard, call out — you know — in an emotion. Like, bark, effectively. [chuckles]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Back from where it is docked. The way a dog would bark to warn its owner that something… is coming for it. [overlapping] What do you do?
Alex: [overlapping] Oh, hell. [clears his throat]
Vinny: [chuckles] 
Alex:  [overlapping] Uh, have…
Vinny: [overlapping] Does everybody else notice this?
Austin: Oh, yeah. Everyone else… yeah. I'm just letting you go first [overlapping] ‘cause you are our heroes.
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] Oh, okay!
Alex: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah. Yeah.
Austin: Everyone else is going to turn and see it. The first person who notices it is Floog’artha.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Because of how… Because it’s Floog’artha.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: No one else knows it's because of Floog’artha, necessarily
Vinny: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: But… it's just happened.
Alex: But we know. We know it's because of Floog’artha.
Austin: Yes. I think Deniel the… head pilgrim is, like:
Deniel, pilgrim leader: ‘Tis a miracle!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Unsure of what this is. Which starts to quiet some of the fear. But they should be scared. They should be scared. [chuckles] 
Alex: Yeah. Okay. So is this thing, like, barreling down on us now?
Austin: It is… like, preparing for a… a dive bomb. You know? It's, like, going up for an attack run, effectively.
Alex: Okay. All right.
Austin: And you can see now it shouldn't be… held together.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] Like, it literally doesn't have enough of its structure to be held together like this. It's being held together by a sort of spiritual energy.
Alex: Is there any sort of visual miasma or anything like that that would indicate, like, a form or a shape? Or is it literally just sort of a… the glowing skeleton?
Austin: Um… It's a… It is a seemingly just kind of a glowing skeleton, I think.
Alex: Got it. All right.
Austin: It seems like it is… It seems like it is possessed, [overlapping] is what it seems like.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: How we visualize, that’s kind of up to us.
Alex: [overlapping] Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] But I don't think there's, like, a gas or a miasma around it. I think that it's in the thing, at this point.
Alex: [overlapping] Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] Maybe it’s settled on it and then it, like, went into the bones of the beast. You know?
Alex: Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] What do you do?
Alex: [overlapping] I would definitely — just very quickly — let my crewmates know that Tinman says danger.
Vinny: And Hard, you said you did not see any… you could not scan or clock any mechanism to open that drawbridge?
Austin: The vision that Floog’artha just had revealed the bell [overlapping] opens both the drawbridge and the aperture at the same time.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, the bell! The bell.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, right. Right.
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] Yep. They’re linked.
Brad: [overlapping] But I think… I think we need… we need the correct hammer to ring the bell, right?
Austin: That is right. [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Whatever the instrument is, yeah.
Vinny: Um… Okay.
Alex: Okay.
Vinny: Unless you guys have something… [overlapping] …I would like to try…
Alex: [overlapping] Not off the top of my head.
Vinny: I would like to try to… convince everyone that we have to get out of here and go in across the drawbridge — to lower the drawbridge and go inside — because this is… I've seen ships like this before come to life…
Austin: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …in places. And I have helped groups of people to survive.
Austin: Is this true? Have you done this?
Vinny: [overlapping] “I always convince those that don't know any better that I put in an honest day's work.”
Austin: [chuckles] Is that a +1 Sentence?
Vinny: That's +2.
Austin: Oh, it's +2! Interesting! Are you… Are you… using your Token on this? +2 is pretty strong. Maybe you don't need to use your Token on this. [overlapping] It’s up to you.
Vinny: [overlapping] I would go +2 it.
Austin: Okay. Someone is going to try to counter you.
Vinny: Hmm.
Austin: Inquisitor Creighton Bile is Realizing his Sentence “I always ferret out the rebellious.” It is now the +1 Sentence “I always ferret out the rebellious who have slipped past me once before.”
Vinny: [laughs]
Brad: Oh, boy.
Austin: But it's only a +1! Right?
Vinny: Hmm…
Austin: So it is going to fail, but I get to mark it!
Vinny: Mm-hm!
Alex: Mm-hm. [overlapping] So that's one mark going to +2.
Austin: [overlapping] Lemme make that… That is right! Exactly.
Alex: All right.
Austin: And it doesn't get countered! Because it fails. And, so: yes, I think he says:
Creighton Bile: The servant speaks correctly! Begin searching for… for a key or a horn…
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] Oh, he doesn’t know?!? Whoa…!
Austin: [overlapping] He doesn't know how to open the damn bridge.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Creighton Bile: Or uh some sort of instrument…!
Vinny: [overlapping] I think Selex is, like…!
Creighton Bile: [overlapping] Perhaps a scroll we need to read!
Selex: [overlapping] You don’t know?!? You don't know how to ring the bell?!?
Creighton Bile: I know what the Immaterial One puts in front of me!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: Oh, boy.
Austin: [halfway in the same intonation] And little more.
Vinny: [laughs] He's, like… Selex is just got, like:
Selex: How do you not know?!?
Alex: [chuckles]
Austin: And the… the group of pilgrims leaps into action and begins to, like, run through the buildings — the old ruins — to try to find… something. They're listening for directions at this point. I think when you raise your voice like that, one of them gives you an odd look before running away.
Vinny: Hmm!
Austin: You're not sure if it's ‘cause, like, this is the second time you've spoken out…
Vinny: Mm-hm…
Austin: …or something else.
Vinny: “I always struggle against my roots.” [chuckles]
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] You do always struggle…! You do always struggle against your roots. It's true. [chuckles] 
Vinny: [chuckles] 
Austin: Yeah, so… Yes. This thing is kind of on the hunt. Everyone's — the very least what you've managed to do — is spread people out. So that you don't get that situation when you're playing XCOM…
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm. Yes.
Vinny: [overlapping] Right. Right.
Austin: [overlapping] …and you put three people behind the same cover, and then a grenade comes in and it hits them all?
Alex: [overlapping] Thank you.
Austin: You’ve, at least, done the right thing of spreading them out. You know?
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: So… What do y’all do?
Brad: Hmm.
Alex: I think Hard is going to — similar to the various pilgrims — start trying to rifle through the nearest buildings he can to try and find this instrument.
Austin: Okay. Um. Do you have a… That's uncertain to me. Do you have anything that would… make that uncertainty clear? Do you have a Means or a Sentence that might help you with that?
Alex: Uh… Okay. Yes, I do. I'm gonna… I'm gonna try and sort of interpret “I always have the right map, somewhere” as…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. That sounds fun.
Vinny: [overlapping] Whoaa…!
Alex: …my action. So the way I'm going to do this is I'm going to… as someone who has been around a lot of moons and has been to a lot of places — even though I have never been to a place exactly like this — there is usually a sort of basic uniformity to how you lay out a living space.
Austin: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Alex: [overlapping] Be it a village, a town, what have you. And so in my mind you would never want to keep that particular object that would ring that bell too far from where that bell is in case there was some kind of emergency.
Austin: [overlapping] Right.
Alex: [overlapping] So I would try and map the area around where the bell is, the belltower is, and I would look specifically in those areas — because that makes the most sense to me.
Austin: There's going to be a bell-keeper’s house or something, like, that.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] That makes perfect sense. And, again, you know…
Alex: [overlapping] Even if I don't know what it looks like I assume it's there.
Austin: Right. [overlapping] Totally. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] I… I don't know if this is me conferring with them or asking you Austin…
Austin: Yep.
Brad: Can I ask what the consequences of…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: …opening this giant aperture this big docking bay would be? I mean, does that open to the void of space at that point…?
Austin: Uh, it seems like it's open to the void of space — your instinct… you have seen versions of this before. Maybe not a ship this big, or one from this ancient culture. But you've seen them open up and be in what looks like open air but somehow not, you know, depressurized.
Brad: Okay.
Austin: Which is different than, like, if… you were deeper into the ship and there was a hull breach — that might depressurize and suck everything out into space. Something about this place has been treated: whether, you know, technologically or magically with some… something that makes it fine to open that outside aperture. You know?
Brad: Okay. Okay.
Austin: So you should be okay. Now you don't know what's [chuckles] behind the big draw bridge! [overlapping] That you cannot vouch for. That, you know…
Alex: [overlapping] Right. Right.
Austin: …you just don't know. Hard, I'm going to say: okay. You… and your intention there — again, this is a game about dramatic intentions — [overlapping] your intention is to find the hammer. Right? Okay.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm. Yes. Find the object.
Austin: Yes. Um. That is a… +0 Sentence, right?
Alex: Yeah. It's not… It's not a… an upgraded Sentence.
Austin: Yeah. Okay. You find your way into the bell-keeper’s… the kind of house of the bell-keeper.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Which is sort of, like, a light lighthouse keeper’s house that's very close near the belltower — maybe even attached to it. And you're looking around for it. You're not spending your Token on this, right?
Alex: No, I'm not spending my Token on this.
Austin: Okay.
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: You're… As you look around the place you can't help but realize that… everything in here is covered in a layer of, like, dirt and dust and grime. And you hear the sound of something chuckling. Something laughing. [makes two creepy chuckles] He-he-hehehh. E-he-heh. And there is a small little ghoul that comes clattering down the stairs, covered in… grime. In dirt and grime. This is the type of creature you’ve never run into before.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: But it is a member of the Rune: it is a wordling, which is a being that seems to inhabit or… you know, embody a particular word.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: And in this case it is… their word is grime.
Vinny: Ayo.
Austin: It is a +0 Sentence. They are countering your ability to find something. Go ahead and scratch that Sentence out and mark it by one.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Like the ghosts or the visions of the past that… Floog’artha saw there's no face here. It's an empty… an empty hole where the face should be. Which means that these little laughs have a strange echoing effect, you know, coming out. There's… It's as if there you're hearing laughter through the depths of a cave system. Or something.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] So, yeah. That…
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Austin: That gets countered. And I think what happens is… you're pretty sure that the instrument you're looking for is here…
[02:15:01]
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: …but there is now this weird ghoul separating you from it.
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Brad: [overlapping] So that's… strike out the right map Sentence? Right?
Austin: That is right. Exactly that. [overlapping] Yeah, strike that out if you can.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Brad: [overlapping] I can do that.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. If you can do that for me I appreciate it. Thank you.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: Let's mark once. Uh. Okay. So, I've never seen one of these things before.
Austin: Mm-hm.
Alex: Is it trying to say anything to me? Or is it just cackling like an asshole?
Austin: It’s just… It's just tackling like an asshole… and as it walks the, like, layers of dirt and Grime begin to build up on everything around it. You know, it kind of comes down a stairway — a little wooden stairway to the second floor — and as it does… just layers of dirt and grease begin piling up on the things all throughout this house… that you're in.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] And are, like, it's spreading like… what do the Zergs spread?
Vinny: Creep?
Austin: The Creep, yeah!
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah, the Creep.
Austin: [overlapping] Across towards you, Hard.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Like, kind of trying to, like, block you in.
Alex: So, yeah. I'm going to… As soon as I see this thing I am absolutely going to start making, like, a backing up motion toward the opening, to the door of this place.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Trying to get at least to the doorway…
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: Probably, like, even before it… it started descending the staircase I was, like: “Nope! I'm backing away! I'm backing away.”
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: “Whatever the fuck that is, I don't want to touch it.”
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: I'm not necessarily trying to run away, but I am just trying to get away from the walls of this place so that it does not… does not, like, block me in.
Austin: Yeah, I love this. This is very good. Um… It is going to try to… be taking a more aggressive action here against you.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] With the same Sentence that it just debuted: “I always embody my word: grime”
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: It's going to, like… As it moves towards you it's kind of, like… running on all fours, like, hopping on all fours…
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] It's about up to your waist, has long lanky arms, it's kind of… like, Gollum. Or something like that. That style of little ghoul with… There's no teeth ‘cause it doesn't have a face.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: But, like, sharp nails that are dragging against the ground. And you can hear them scratch on the first, like, move and then on the second move you can't ‘cause it's all so [chuckles] dirt-covered [overlapping] that it becomes, like… you know, it's not hitting the tile anymore.
Alex: [overlapping] Right. Like, softer.
Austin: Yeah, exactly.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: And… Yeah. It's trying to, like… It's trying to, like, jump on you and… pin you down, and cover you with its gross, like, grimy moldy body, and essence. And…
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Basically, trying to make you part of the ruin here.
Alex: Okay.
Brad: Can I… Can I ask what effect this thing would suffer if it were… washed clean? [chuckles] 
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] Would that be harmful…?
Austin: [overlapping] You'd have to… Play to find out what happens, Brad!
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] We have to find out!
Austin: [overlapping] You gotta…
Alex: [overlapping] Well, do you have a way to do that?
Brad: [overlapping] I’m wondering… wondering would it be harmful to this thing for it to be cleaned up?
Austin: We… Maybe! I don't know! We'd have… Let's find out!
Brad: Hold up… I've got this I've got this +2 Sentence — and it's I've been trying to crack the nut on this thing and I'm not quite sure I have yet —
Austin: Okay, what is the +2 Sentence?
Brad: …because it's “I always trade the blood of my enemies for effect unless the blood of a friend is required” [overlapping] Like, blood in a literal sense?
Austin: [overlapping] What are you trying… You wrote it, right?
Brad: [overlapping] A figurative sense?
Austin: [overlapping] I wrote the blood for effect part. In my mind that's a Sentence that's…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. That’s the…
Austin: …that's your blood magic Sentence. You know what I mean?
Brad: That's what I was wondering: if we're talking literal blood or…
Austin: Oh, we're… Yeah. I think we're talking literal… I think we're talking literal blood here.
Brad: Okay.
Austin: Again, table by table someone else might, you know… [overlapping] Would that be a good Sentence?
Vinny: [overlapping] Could be like family…!
Austin: [overlapping] That’s what I was gonna say.
Brad: [overlapping] Or… Or… Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yes. A hundred percent.
Brad: Or I was thinking maybe I could interpret it a little bit more like life-force of some… You know. [overlapping] Like, the grime of this creature is kind of its life essence. Or its blood. 
Vinny: [overlapping] Ohhh…!
Austin: [overlapping] That's really fun. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] That is… It is what I mean. So, to counter… to counter the grimness of this thing is to effectively deprive it of life, potentially?
Austin: Yeah. No, I think that you could do that.
Brad: [overlapping] Does that make sense?
Austin: [overlapping] I think it's a really great intent to declare.
Brad: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] What you need to do is tell me how you're cleaning it. And that might be its own separate challenge first. Do you know what I mean?
Brad: [overlapping] Conjure an…
Austin: [overlapping] Where are you getting the water from?
Brad: [overlapping] Conjure a big old bucket of soap and water… [chuckles]
Austin: Okay. Well, that's…
Brad: [overlapping] I don’t know!
Austin: [overlapping] What are you doing to conjure that soap and water?
Alex: [overlapping] What is the ritual?
Austin: [overlapping] Like, let’s break down that kind of two things.
Brad: [overlapping] Um…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. What's the ritual? Also, you didn't have your Token! I do think maybe this would be “responding to an urgent problem with ritualistic Means”!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Alex is being chased by a…
Alex: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: [overlapping] …a creature that's trying to… choke him out with grime — and meanwhile…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. Let’s say I fell out of the doorway and it's on top of me in the doorway.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Which is why you can see this happening.
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: Um…
Austin: So, yeah. Let's break this down. Because there's kind of two things happening: one is you're trying to, like, douse it in water; and the second is that you want that to have a deleterious effect on its very being since it is a creature of pure grime.
Brad: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] So let's out if you could douse it first.
Alex: Okay.
Brad: Okay. Um. I don't know. I'm imagining some kind of hand motion and furious shouting of incantations…?
Austin: Yeah. And that's “I always know which old words serve my aims,” presumably?
Brad: Yeah. Sure… Yeah. [overlapping] I don't… Actually, isn’t that two Sentences?
Austin: [overlapping] Or is something?
Brad: [overlapping] Or is that… Is that combining two Sentences here? Or…?
Austin: [overlapping] You know, I’m gonna do…
Brad: [overlapping] Oh, oh, oh! It’s a multi…
Austin: [overlapping] I’m taking two different…
Brad: Got it.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. It’s a multi-stage…
Austin: [overlapping] It’s a multi-step thing. Exactly.
Brad: [overlapping] Multi-step.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. Then I guess… I guess that would be that one, yeah.
Austin: Um. I guess I have a question: is this your aim? Tell me why this is your aim, in this moment. Is this… a classic “I'm saving Hard so that Hard can [overlapping] continue to watch my back?”
Brad: [overlapping] Yes. Or, or, or…
Alex: [overlapping] He could get you home?
Brad: [overlapping] Well, what I was starting to say I believe that he… I believe that he can find the hammer that will get us out of here?
Austin: [overlapping] Okay. That makes perfect sense.
Brad: [overlapping] Although… he has lost the map ability, temporarily — so maybe that's not a… like, a firm belief anymore?
Austin: [overlapping] Ehhh…!
Brad: [overlapping] But that would be the… That would be the opportunistic way for the character to look at it.
Austin: Yeah. I think that that makes perfect sense to me. So, yes. There's nothing here in this moment that is preventing you from Conjuring some water. It splashes down onto the body of the… the wordling. Now, the second question. “I always trade blood for effect.” You're trading your enemy's blood — which is seemingly this essential grime that makes it up. And what is your dramatic intent here? What do you… What do you want to happen? What's the… the best way this could go for you? What do you want to happen here?
Brad: Yeah. Let's… I mean, let's say, in my mind it's a leap of faith but I'm hoping that cleaning the thing will neutralize it in some…
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: …permanent fashion. [chuckles] Let's say I hope it dies.
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: [overlapping] That makes perfect sense.
Alex: [overlapping] Compromise to a permanent end.
Austin: [overlapping] Yes. That makes perfect sense.
Brad: [overlapping] Yes. There you go.
Austin: I love this. Um. I think that this is going to work. I… I'm double checking my own Sentences — I want to see… I think that… we get another… we get another Rune Sentence here. We get another, like… they're going to try to counter you here. But it's… it will not work, because this is a +1 or a +2 Sentence? Right? +2 Sentence?
Brad: Which one? [overlapping] The blood one is a +2.
Austin: [overlapping] The one that… The second one that you're using. This new one: “I always trade the blood…”
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. That’s a +2…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. I think that that's going to succeed. You do learn: it does try to counter you. You know. As the water begins to pour on it and wash it away, it leaps off of Hard and, like, comes to try to, like, choke you out. And… actually, feast on you — using the Sentence… This is a Rune Faction Sentence. Which means it's not just this individual creature.
Brad: [chuckles]
Austin: But it's all of the ghouls of the Rune: “Rune ghouls always Feast on the youngest meat.”
Vinny: Ohh! [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Aahh!
Austin: [overlapping] But they fail.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] They fail.
Brad: [overlapping] That’s me. Hm…
Austin: [overlapping] Which is weird, because I'm pretty sure Hard is younger than you — but it does suggest something's true… about Hard’s…
Alex: [overlapping] I don't think we really said ages!
Austin: We didn't! And Hard, you might be the oldest person here — [overlapping] just not in the way that…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Hmm…
Austin: … appears, visually.
Alex: [overlapping] Literally an old soul.
Austin: [overlapping] You know, souls are old and strange. Yeah
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: Exactly. And I'm going to go ahead and cross that out and mark it for the Rune Ghouls.
Alex: Um… [overlapping] As Hard…
Austin: [overlapping] Um. And yes. It melts away, like, the Wicked Witch of the West. You know?
Alex: Nice.
Austin: First, the layer of grime, and then it is… you see its… raw body underneath is, like… it's skin — but it's bone-colored skin. And it's brittle. And once it's fully clean it just, like [imitates soft cracking sound] breaks and shatters and falls to the ground.
Alex: [overlapping] Nice.
Vinny: [overlapping] It's pretty metal!
Austin: [overlapping] Thank you.
Alex: [overlapping] Um. When Hard regains his composure he stands up. And sort of — like, you would in a Looney Tunes cartoon when, like, one of those characters goes under a floor buffer — he is just, like, glistening and shining.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [chuckles]
Alex: Like, you can actually hear the [imitates a glinting sound] bling! coming off of him…
Austin: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] …because a bunch of that water got on him, too.
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: Yes. Amazing. Yes. And for you, it did not melt you away it simply did clean you off a little bit, thankfully.
Vinny: Hmm.
Alex: Just brought a little of the handsome back.
Austin: Exactly. Where are you in the middle of all of this, Selex? Are you off in some other building? Or you…
Vinny: I… Yeah. I don't think I would have seen any of this. I think I… I think Selex is… still flabbergasted that… they don't know…! [chuckles] “They don't know how to open this thing up?!?” Like, they…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: From, like… Even just from, like, a mechanical engineering standpoint it's just…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: …trying to be like: “How would a bell open this up…? Like, there's got to be something. A wire that connects to the drawbridge…” And it's kind of looking…
Austin: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …looking for the connection between the — not necessarily how to ring the bell — but how the bell interacts with the drawbridge. In some way.
Austin: Sure. Okay. Are you… Is that an intent? Are you trying to, like, achieve that in… play? Like, do you want to do a Sentence to try to get that?
Vinny: Um… [overlapping] Well… I think…
Austin: [overlapping] Or you just… Is that just an image of you in the moment?
Vinny: Yeah. I mean, like, I guess I would always… I'm trying to find the simple but effective solution. Like, a bell seems so overly complicated to open a drawbridge. Like, I'm…
Austin: Right.
Vinny: There has to be a thing stopping this drawbridge [overlapping] from falling down and coming down.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: It's… We still apply logic to things. Right? There are physics inside this ship. How is it not just falling down?
Austin: What are you using to achieve that intent? What Means are you… bringing to bear?
Vinny: Um… What am I trying to do? I think… It's a really big chasm, right?
Austin: It is a… It is like the Grand Canyon. Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] It's a really big one. Yeah.
Vinny: I think first he's looking… I think first he would go and look for where this drawbridge would have to fall and dock [overlapping] to meet with our end of the chasm.
Austin: [overlapping] Smart.
Vinny: Right?
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] And then what would lock it into place there — and work backwards to be, like, what kind of locking mechanisms is this technology using to keep things in place. Right? There must be… He's, like, rubbing the dirt away from where it would land to be like: “Okay, is this magnetic?”
Austin: [overlapping] Right.
Vinny: [overlapping] “Is this some kind of…” You know. “What are we looking at here?” And then tracing wires around. You know?
Austin: Yeah. Are you… What Means are you using to clarify this uncertainty?
Vinny: Um… [overlapping] Like, which Sentence?
Austin: [overlapping] Which Sentence are you using? Yeah. Yeah, Means we’re going really broad.
Vinny: [overlapping] “I always simple but effective solution.”
Austin: All right. You are being countered.
Vinny: Hmm!
Austin: As you're looking around that area you're… You find exactly what you hoped you'd find. Which is, like: [overlapping] “Aha! Here is, like…”
Vinny: [overlapping] Right. [chuckles]
Austin: Not just where the draw bridge would drop. Because it's huge. You know, [overlapping] that's, like, a mile across.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: But at the edge of it — where it would fall — there is, like, a… Like, you know, a little booth where someone might work… [chuckles] 
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: …to attend to where it lands. [overlapping] You know?
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] Okay. Okay.
Austin: And… next to that there is, like, a giant iron spike that you would, like, chain it down to make sure it's secure. Stuff like that. And you're, like, investigating all of this and you're like: “Are there any controls…? Are there any…?” You know, in fact… I'll give you a little bit for free — a little freebie, here —: inside of that booth there is a… There's no, like, traditional controls in the way that you would think of, like, a ship being controlled or a space station in your life as you've seen it. Instead, there is a clay panel that… the clay of it is… like, it's a liquid clay. It's, like, soft clay.
Vinny: [overlapping] Like, mushy?
Austin: [overlapping] But as the hummm is coming through… that — again, every 18 seconds that kind of goes through — it shakes and… almost, like, ripples. Like water does.
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh-huh…
Austin: And next to it is a stylus that you could theoretically write something into. You don't know what this does. But as you're looking at this going, like: “Huh! Weird. Weird clay stylist control board…” Someone jumps on you and pins you to the ground, and you can feel a knife at your back. You have been countered by the Sentence “I always get the drop on targets of The Syndicate.”
Vinny: [overlapping] Ouhhh…
Austin: [overlapping] And someone whispers in your ear… What's your last name? Clavatron?
Vinny: Clavatron.
Erasure of the Bell-keeper: Mr Clavatron, your contract is up.
Austin: And the knife is at the back of your neck. This is the Sentence — you don't know who it's from — “I always get the drop on targets of The Syndicate.” It's a +1 Sentence.
Vinny: Um. Do I recognize the…? I don't know who it's from? I don't recognize the voice?
Austin: [overlapping] Oh you’re a…
Vinny: [overlapping] But I do recognize the voice!
Austin: [whispers] You do recognize the voice.
Vinny: ‘Cause “I always remind those in positions of power of their Origins.” [overlapping] I'm going to try…
Austin: [overlapping] I don't know if this person… I don't know that this person is in a position of power!
Vinny: [overlapping] Over me…?
Austin: [overlapping] I mean! You know what? They are!
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] They’re in a position power over me!
Alex: [overlapping] It’s a different definition, but yeah!
Austin: [overlapping] They’re literally in a position of power over you. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Vinny: They are wielding the power over me, right?
Austin: Yep, they are. This is your daughter.
[pause]
Vinny: Oh, man.
Austin: Decades on.
Vinny: [chuckles] Ohhh, no! Austin!
Austin: Now, the person who looked at you when you started raising your voice and then recognized you, again — when you raised your voice again — when you when you were, like: [overlapping] “How can you not know?”
Vinny: [overlapping] Ohhh…!
Austin: …was your daughter.
Vinny: [overlapping] Why would you do that?
Alex: [overlapping] [imitates dramatic music cue] Bam-bam-BHAAAMMM!
Austin: What's… What's your daughter's name?
Vinny: Uh… “What is my daughter's name?” My daughter's name is… Zena.
Austin: Zena. With an X or with a Z?
Vinny: With… We'll go with the Z.
Austin: With the… Yeah. We're making an original.
Vinny: Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. Absolutely.
Austin: [overlapping] There we go. Zena. Zena the blackguard.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Or the blackguard depending on how you want to pronounce that word.
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: Has… Has gotten the drop on you with this +1 Sentence “I always get the drop on targets of The Syndicate.”
Vinny: Oh, man! Um…
Austin: Which, unfortunately, means that you get to mark and cross out “I always find a simple but effective solution.” Because it is countered for the rest of the scene.
Vinny: Oh, man. Okay. [whispering] Oh no…
Austin: And I guess really quick. A couple of things, important things.
[02:30:00]
Austin: One — before you respond here, I hate to drag us down for a second — I'm uncrossing out “Venerant See parishioners are always suspicious informants,” because it has been more than a scene since then.
Vinny: Uh-huh!
Austin: And… I'll save the other thing for the next time someone makes a Sentence. Because there's one rule that you haven't used yet that could still be useful for you.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] What do you do with knife at your back? It sounded like what you were doing was reminding someone of their roots.
Vinny: Yes. That is exactly what I'm doing. But! I mean this is… This is, like, pretty heavy…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] So, like… The knife is… The knife is literally at my back. But I’d…
Austin: [overlapping] It’s in your… It’s in the back of your neck. You recognize her voice immediately.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: I think… I think I'd recognize that voice immediately so much that I don't care, I'm just going to whip around and I'm going to take, like, a slice to the side of the neck. Like…
Austin: Oooh…!
Vinny: Yeah. Just, like… Just… [overlapping] You know, like, a turn…
Alex: [overlapping] A grazing blow?
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Vinny: Because I'm… You know. This is what I've been waiting for. It doesn't matter.
Austin: Yeah. I think… You know, yeah. You lock eyes… you know, she's wearing the same sort of robes as the rest of the pilgrims — but has pulled a, like, a mask up above her, you know, her mouth and nose. So you just see her eyes. Those are her eyes. You know her eyes. [overlapping] A hundred percent.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: Hair is, you know… Hair is in the cut that… Floog’artha gave you to, [overlapping] like, sneak in.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, no! [chuckles] Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: You don't actually have that hair —but she does. She is wearing the prince valiant cut… for real. And, yeah. The knife, like, cuts against you. Are you using that Sentence on her to get some effect in this moment?
Vinny: Uh. Yes. I am… I'm going to try… I'm trying to get her to lower the… lower the knife. [overlapping] To recognize her…
Austin: [overlapping] Uh. Yes. Yes.
Vinny: …what's going on here.
Austin: That's a +1 Sentence, is that right?
Vinny: It is a +1 Sentence.
Austin: Um. Okay. She is going to try to counter it. Um… And you can sense this attempt… with “I always disappear into the dark,” like… where she'll try to, like, get another stab at you or something.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: But she… It fails. It's a +0 Sentence. It's going to fail. I get to mark it. She can't… You know. She tries to back away from you in this moment. But actually can't bring herself to. Her eyes locked with yours.
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh…
Austin: [overlapping] It’s countered. And she says:
Austin (as Zena): [gravely] No.
[pause]
Austin: She… She's like…
Zena: I… I can't… I can't do it now.
Austin: And kind of, like, steps back. Um. And it kind of becomes clear she needed to stab you in the back. She could kill you.
Vinny: Yeah. [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] But not if she looked at you, in your eyes. Not if she rec… Not if she faced you while she… while it happened.
Vinny: Oh, man. I'm going to say… Does she still have, like, the knife with the blood kind of coming down the knife? [overlapping] Like… down the neck?
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, yeah. The blood is dripping off the knife. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. I'm just…
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, no…
Vinny: I'm just kind of wordless… Almost… Almost maybe, like, ready to just die here…? Like, just kind of staring at…
Austin: Oh, no… You have no idea, Vinny.
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] The knife was poisoned.
Austin: [overlapping] She says:
Zena: Oh no, Dad!
Austin: “When I have time to prepare, I always coat my blade [overlapping] with a deadly poison.”
Alex: Yeah…
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: Damn.
Vinny: Oh…
Austin: [overlapping] This is not intentional.
Alex: [overlapping] So even a grazing blow could be deadly.
Austin: And it's already happened!
Vinny: Hmm…
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: Selex grazed himself with it!
Vinny: [overlapping] True!
Austin: [overlapping] That wasn't me!
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah, it was. It’s true.
Austin: [overlapping] Selex explicitly said: “I turn in a way that cuts me.” “The blood is dripping.”
Vinny: Um…
Alex: [overlapping] Does she have an antidote?
Zena: [overlapping] We have get you…
Austin: She does not have the antidote.
Zena: We have to get you help.
Vinny: [chuckles] Um.
Zena: What are you doing here?!?
Vinny: What… I think Selex is just in shock… Like, this is all happening very quickly…
Austin: Uh-huh.
Vinny: And I think he's just, like, stammering. He's just, like:
Selex: How… How are you here…? What… Why?
Zena: The thornbane will run through your system… I didn't stab you deep, so it won't be instant. But you're dying. We have to get you help now.
Austin: Deflecting your question here.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [overlapping] Just like… he's… He's kind of, like, white knuckle…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] …on her shoulders. Just, like:
Selex: How are you here?
Zena: I'm here on a mission. I'm here to kill all these people… and take this place for everything it's worth.
Austin: Like, as if like: “duh.” [overlapping] Like, gives you the look, like…
Vinny: [overlapping] [laughs] Yeah, yeah!
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: …”come on, isn't that why…” Actually it's, like:
Zena: Isn't that why you're here?
Vinny: [laughs] Like… He's, like, you know…
Selex: Where have you been?
[pause]
Selex: I…
Zena: Where have I been? You left us!
Vinny: Uh, I'm going to say, like, maybe the poison is starting to get on him a little bit. He's, like, a little confused. He, like:
 Selex: No! No, that's not right. No, you left!
Austin: That… Your belief is that they did leave. [overlapping] Right?
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah-yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Or that, you know…
Vinny: [overlapping] Right. Oh, totally. She disappeared.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: Yeah, yeah.
Austin: Uh-huh.
Vinny: Yeah. But… But he's like… you know it's starting… Maybe the poison's starting to get on him a little bit. [overlapping] Like…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Selex: No, no, no. No, that's not right. You left. With…
Austin: Yeah.
Selex: With Big Xena.
Vinny: [chuckles] [overlapping] That's the mom.
Austin: [overlapping] Big Zena.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] Uh-huh.
Vinny: [overlapping] That's with a… That’s with an X.
Austin: [overlapping] Bigxena. One word. One word?
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Selex and… 
Vinny: [overlapping] Well, that's, like, her Syndicate name.
Austin: [chuckles] Right. Of course. Yes.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [overlapping] That's like… Look, I've got a lot of family members that's, like, Big Joey and Little Joey.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah. Big Xena, Little Xena.
Vinny: [overlapping] This is like… We have Big Xena and Little Xena.
Austin: Yea-yea-yeah. Of course. Big Xe.
Vinny: [chuckles] [overlapping] Big Xe.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: Yeah. And… I think… You know. As you're having this conversation there is the loud slam of the giant fish ship crashing into the city behind you. Um. You hear the sound of some of the other parishioners shouting and screaming. Now, you know, the… the danger having come to pass over there. No one there is… You know, like you I said: you separated them out.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] But I just want to emphasize: no one's, like, protecting them from that thing. So there are some… There are some losses. I think… she privately is, like: “I guess I don't have to… I don't have to kill all of them! The fish is going to kill… the rest of them for me, probably!”
Vinny: [chuckles] 
Austin: Uh. But, yeah. I think… tries to lift you up. Tries to pick you up off the ground. Not lift you — but, like, help you up. I think, again, the Sentence that was used against you — [overlapping] unintentionally, that you triggered — is…
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: “When I have time to repair I always coat my blade with a deadly poison.” She certainly had time to prepare.
Vinny: [overlapping] Uh-huh.
Austin: [overlapping] She'd seen you earlier. Uh… You can try to counter that. It's a +2 Sentence. So… The poison is running through your system. The intent is that you will die by the end of this session…
Vinny: Uh-huh.
Austin: …if you don't get some sort of cure. So you can choose to try to counter that if you'd like to.
Vinny: Hoohh! Um…
Alex: I have a suggestion for you if you want it.
Vinny: Yeah.
Alex: This is your Dream, isn't it?
Austin: [chuckles]
Brad: [chuckles] I was gonna say the same thing!
Vinny: Yeah. Um… [overlapping] Yes.
Brad: [overlapping] This is what Dreams are made for!
Alex: Mm-hm.
[pause]
Vinny: I'm trying to think how… how Selex would… counteract this — even with the Dream, though. I mean, do I still have to… I still got to figure out how…
Austin: You still have to argue…
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: You supposed to be grounded in fiction, but…
Alex: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: [overlapping] But it's a really broad…
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: …you know, place here. You know? You can say something about the world; you can say something that's… You kno,w I could make a suggestion, here. [overlapping] If you want.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: I… You're the closest person to the sound of that voice coming through the drawbridge. You're at the edge of that chasm. And the words… the power of the words that are being echoed… could interact with your Dream in some way that purges the poison from you but leaves you scarred.
Vinny: Hmmm…!
[pause]
Alex: [whispering] I like that.
Vinny: Um… Okay. Let me think for just a second here. So…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Sure.
Vinny: I’ve still got a full Token, right?
Austin: You do still have your Token, I believe! Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] I still have a… I recharged it. Yeah. Right.
Austin: [overlapping] You could also just find a Sentence here that works! it is recharged.
Vinny: Um…
[pause]
Vinny: Okay. [chuckles] Okay. Could I do a Moon Sentence?
Austin: You could spend… You could… You could spend your Token on a Moon Sentence…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. But it’ll be zero?
Austin: [overlapping] …but it will not… It would be a zero. It will not beat that plus… That +0.
Vinny: [overlapping] +2. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] That +2 that has been used… [chuckles] That you used against yourself unknowingly.
Vinny: But… can I make a +3 Sentence? That would do it?
Austin: [overlapping] You have…
Vinny: [overlapping] Or is that +2, is it?
Austin: You only need a +2! So…
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] So you can take a +1 to a +2, ‘cause you're defending, technically. So… you could theoretically get a +2 Sentence — [overlapping] which could be a +1 that you already have… Yep.
Vinny: [overlapping] Okay. I wanna… I wanna charge… I wanna charge… Use my Token…
Austin: [overlapping] Yep.
Vinny: [overlapping] …to make one of my Sentences a +2. For now.
Austin: Okay. Which Sentence is it?
Vinny: “I always remind those in positions of power of their origins.”
Austin: Hm.
Vinny: Um… And I want to remind… I want to change it to “I always remind those in positions of power of their… of our shared origins.”
Austin: Okay.
Vinny: And I want to look her in the eye and be, like:
Selex: You've always been smarter than this. You'll find a way.
Austin: Huh. All right. A couple things: One, I don't still don't necessarily know how that saves your poison situation [overlapping] but we can unfold that.
Vinny: [overlapping] She’s gonna find a way! She knows how to do it.
Austin: Okay. That's really fun! Okay. Uh…
Vinny: She's not gonna let me die.
Austin: She's not gonna let you die. She's gonna figure out how to… save you from it. Yeah, okay.
Vinny: Yeah.
Alex: She's an expert in this shit!
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: She is an expert in this shit. I do want to… I do want to offer you something else, which I have not offered previously. You know. You want to move quick. There's another way you can temporarily boost a Sentence besides a Token.
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: You can Hone a Sentence…
Vinny: Houuhh…!
Austin: Once per… Once per session you can pick one of your Sentences and, like, Realize it temporarily: you can boost it by one by changing it, like, as if you're Realizing it — leveling it up — regular style, except it's just for the rest of the session. When you do that you mark it as if it had been countered… [overlapping] You don't cross it out but you mark it as if it had been countered.
Vinny: [overlapping] Ohhh…!
Austin: And then you write that new… additional condition in parentheses, but you don't have to spend your Token [overlapping] to do that. So for inst…
Vinny: [overlapping] Let’s do that!
Austin: Let's do that. So let's add what… What did you want to rewrite it? [overlapping] Or what did you want to boost it to say?
Vinny: [overlapping] I wanted… I wanted to say “I always remind those in positions of power of our shared origins.” And so…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. So I’mma just add that and put it in parentheses so that it's clear that that's a Honed Sentence.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: Which brings it up temporarily to a +2. Importantly, you know, you could now boost that 2 to a 3 in a later Conflict at this point.
Vinny: Okay. [overlapping] If it's in the same session.
Austin: [overlapping] So… If it's in the same session.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. For the rest of the session that's a +2. It's already Realized. Which is really useful, because… Honing is fun because it's a way to try out Realization before you commit to it.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Mm-hm.
Austin: And… Importantly, worth saying — I don't think this is true for anybody here yet — but if you had a Sentence at three marks already, if it was Primed for Realization you couldn't then Hone it. Because it's ready to be Primed. Or it's ready to be Realized.
Alex: Right.
Austin: A Primed Sentence…
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: Realization has a gravity all its own. You know, it's going to happen.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: So… So, yeah. [overlapping] You remind those of…
Vinny: [overlapping] So I'm grabbing her and I'm saying… I look at her and it's a poison starting to really take effect.
Austin: [overlapping] Egh… Yeah. Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] [overlapping] maybe, like, the veins are starting to, like, creep up you know turn purple and whatever. I'm, like:
Selex: When we were on our own we got through tougher scrapes in this. You always pulled through. You'll find a solution.
Zena: All right. All right, all right, all right, all right! Keep moving! I need you to… just keep moving I'll be…
Austin: And, like, you know… reaches into the robe and starts producing little vials and little… [overlapping] sachets of herbs.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah!
Austin: You know, goes to the little… toll booth thing [chuckles] that's next to the thing…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …and, like, kneels down and, like, find some sort of… you know, grass that's miraculously growing there. And takes it. Does, like, an etching off the side of the building to mix in some of these ancient… the plaster of this place.
Vinny: Yes! [chuckles]
Austin: And cuts her hand and adds her own blood into it.
Vinny: [sighs]
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] And, like, stirs it up. And…
Vinny: Ah, man…
Austin: And… you know, applies it… You know. Does a second cut on the back of your neck to…
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: …make an X. And then, like, applies this solution there. And she says:
Zena: I don't think this will remove it but it will slow it down to… decades, instead of… you know, minutes.
Vinny: [overlapping] Aww, man!
Austin: [overlapping] So you're still slowly dying from this poison!
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] But it might not kill you until after you die from something else, many-many-many-many years later, anyway. You know?
Vinny: And he says:
Selex: I was already slowly dialing… dying — having never seen you again.
Zena: [sighs] We should keep moving.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Does not want to face all that right now.
[pause]
Austin: You know, was trying to kill you seconds ago.
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Still… to kill you.
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] Still don’t know why! Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] This has been one hell of a quick face-turn.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Yeah. Well! You know… her job here was to kill everybody and take everything.
Alex: Right.
Austin: You're… everybody. You’re a target. It's not… you know. It's just a shame.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: Anyway. Back in the belltower area… what's going on with… Floog’ortha… with Floog’artha and Hard? Are you back to looking for this… bell… hammer? This hammerbell?
Alex: Bellringer? Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] The bellringer? Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. I think I would have… I would have given Floog’artha a very hearty thanks… and then squeakily walk back into the house to start immediately trying to paw through everything to find that instrument.
Austin: Um. Yeah. I… So, I think that you've now thankfully gotten through that… past the wordling. But now you still… It's a big place! You know, there's a couple floors. I mean, you know it's in here somewhere but you're gonna… it's uncertain where it is. So I'm going to need another Sentence, another Means of some sorts to find it.
Alex: Okay. [overlapping] Um…
Austin: [overlapping] Either from you or Floog’artha
Alex: I need to see…
Brad: Have we established that the hammer only opens the port to outside? [overlapping] We don’t…
Austin: [overlapping] It goes both. It’s… If you hit the bell it'll open both at the same time. Yeah.
Brad: “Both” meaning the… [overlapping] drawbridge as well?
Austin: [overlapping] The outside aperture and the drawbridge are linked by some sort of magic.
Brad: [overlapping] Oh, I didn’t realize… Oh, I… I must’ve…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Mm-hm.
Brad: [overlapping] I must have lost over that detail. Okay.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] No worries. It came late. So.
Alex: So here's a question I have: are we going to get sucked into space if that thing gets opened?
Austin: You are not. We… Vinny asked that — you're good.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] This part of space… or this one part of the ship is fine for that.
Alex: Okay. All right. So that thing opening does not require anything extra. Got it.
Austin: It should be fine. Yeah.
Alex: All right.
Austin: In fact I'm… I am using… You know it's in here somewhere. I'm using a Moon Sentence against you. Which is sort of a… an inverted Moon Sentence. There's two ways you could read this Moon Sentence: one of them is, like, good for you; and one of them is bad for you.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: “The Thrummer’s shadows always hide ancient knowledge.” 
[02:45:00]
Austin: Now, if you use that Sentence you might have found ancient knowledge ‘cause the Shadows hide ancient knowledge. But I'm using it the other way which is…
Alex: Right.
Austin: The Thrummer’s shadows always hide — they always cover up — ancient knowledge. You might need to… [overlapping] refresh… that page. Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Refresh? Mm-hm.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] I think it'll update, Vinny. I know that's annoying.
Vinny: No, no! [overlapping] I’m just trying to…
Austin: [overlapping] So that is… being used against you and Floog’artha, Hard…
Alex: [overlapping] Okay…
Austin: [overlapping] …in order to try to keep the… bell-hammer from both of you. Do either of you have a way of countering that Sentence? it's only a +0 Sentence.
Brad: Hmmm…
[pause]
Alex: Thinking about it. [overlapping] I'm wondering…
Austin: [overlapping] And unfortunately your map Sentence remains…
Alex: Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: …crossed out.
Brad: Could hide in this case mean, like, a bear? [overlapping] As in like shadows here always… beared…?
Austin: [overlapping] In this case, I think you using it would be in that way.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] But because it's being used against you I'm deciding what it means.
Brad: [overlapping] I see.
Austin: [overlapping] And it means…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …you know, cover up.
Brad: [overlapping] Got it. Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] And unfortunately a Moon Sentence cannot counter itself. So you cannot spend a Token to use the same Moon Sentence against itself.
Brad: [overlapping] Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] Unfortunately.
Alex: Okay. [overlapping] Here…
Austin: [overlapping] You could spend a Token to make a new one, though! If you wanted. Go ahead, Hard.
Alex: Okay. First question I have: is there a way I can leverage the fact that Floog’artha is here and our Bond Sentence maybe to… push past this?
Austin: A thousand percent.
Alex: ‘Cause… So my Bond Sentence with Floog’artha is: “Floog’artha is the most precious cargo my Vessel’s ever carried. I won't ruin this job.” I am interpreting this…
Austin: [overlapping] Mm-hm…
Brad: [overlapping] Pressure!
Alex: [overlapping] — in this particular case — as with Floog’artha's… let's just say slightly judgmental gaze upon me…
Austin: [chuckles] Uh-huh!
Alex: …I am very self-conscious of this and I refuse to let myself fail in front of them.
Austin: Yes. I love that. I love that, too, because it goes from being, like: “Oh, my most precious cargo!”; like: “Oh, I really want to take care of Floog’artha!” — to, like: “if I… manage to help Floog’artha through this I'm going to get so many more jobs! Like, this is proving that I can work with a whole new class of clientele!” You know?
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: That totally works! That's totally… It's only a +0, but so is the Sentence being used against you. That's going to counter the “shadows always hiding ancient knowledge.” Which is unfortunate in some ways, because it means you can't use that Sentence anymore: it's countered.
Alex: Right.
Austin: Your bravery in this moment: you go down dark hallways; you know, you go into the second or the third… You go into the second floor and then you find the attic. And you go into the attic. And in the attic you find the… a sort of altar that has… an apron… Or not an apron. But, like, a frock, I guess, with a… separate hood; a… a walking stick and the bell-hammer. And the bell-hammer…
Alex: Okay.
Austin: …is a piece of Ephemera. As you lift it sort of… resonates with magical power. It is called the Bell-keeper’s Hammer…
Alex: Okay.
Austin: And, you know… One second. I'm going to add to the actual Ephemera Sentence here. It is… it says… It's a +3 — which is very powerful. Ephemera do not need the… to match the sort of qualification Sentences. They don't need to be Realized in order to be powerful. You know, the Master Sword is, like… “The Master Sword always defeats Darkness.” +3.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: It's just that good. It doesn't need to have all that other stuff. In this case…
Alex: Right.
Austin: …the… this thing has: “When struck against something other than the Bell, the Bell-keeper's Hammer always sounds a shattering peel.” Which is to say: if you hit this on anything that isn't the bell, it will break it. It will release a sound that, like, breaks stuff — you know? — all around it. We know what it does when it hits the Bell itself, which is it will open the… door and [overlapping] the drawbridge.
Alex: [overlapping] Drawbridge.
Austin: But it is also just a powerful, if dangerous, and unpredictable weapon.
Alex: [overlapping] Cool.
Austin: [overlapping] That gets three uses. Ephemera get used three times and then you don't get to use them as Means anymore. They… You still might have it! You know, maybe in this case the Hammer breaks after three uses or something.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Or doesn't have that power, literally, anymore. But Link never loses the Master Sword… You know… Blade never loses the glaive…
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] But Blade only gets to do the cool glaive toss, like, twice in a movie before you're, like: “All right, we're not going to shoot it as if it's a big deal anymore!”
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] “He's just using the glaive. It's just part of his repertoire.” It's not, like… a special cool thing he has at this point. So, yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Does ringing the bell count as a use?
Austin: It would not because you would not be… It only counts as a use when you're using it as a Means in a Sentence. Right?
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] So, as a Means in a Conflict.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: So you could even… You could describe doing something else… something where you're using a different Means but having the hammer and that won't count. It only counts when it's the sort of… you know, when it's the key that fits in the lock that is the problem. If that makes sense.
Alex: Got it. [overlapping] Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] A very powerful key.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. Okay.
Vinny: [overlapping] +3?
Austin: +3. And as you… Floog’artha, are you with… are you with Hard as this happens?
Brad: Yeah. Yeah.
Austin: You know, from this attic there is a window that looks out down on the… the village below. And — I think, you know — out there you can see this creature, this… this skeletal Orphan Vessel continue to hunt down and devour [chuckles] the pilgrims below.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: And then as Hard is, like, leaning down to pick this thing up you see a form begin to take shape behind him. It is a… a tall muscular figure. It seems to be the spirit of the Bell-keeper. Or… I mean, what it's called, it's an erasure: it is sort of the remnant of the Bell-keeper who once stood here. And underneath, you know, in a low voice he says:
Erasure of the Bell-keeper: My hammer.
Austin: And with a ghastly arm begins to reach out for Hard — using the Sentence “I always seek what is missing” — his hammer being… having been disturbed from its resting place in the Attic. His intent is to choke [chuckles] Hard Markinson out.
Alex: Hm!
Austin: What do you do, Floog’artha?
Brad: What is that? Which Sentence was that?
Austin: I will read it again. You don't necessarily get to know what the…
Brad: [overlapping] What the level is? Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] … level it is. Uh-huh. I always…
Alex: [overlapping] You can divine maybe by the number of qualifiers in it. But…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] Sorry.
Austin: [overlapping] Now, maybe. But it could have started with… “I always seek something useful to me.”
Vinny: Hmm…
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] And it could have advanced to “I always seek what is missing.”
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: But… Yeah. It's there. It's the third… It's the final NPC on the right middle on that… on your Band and World List.
Alex: Okay.
Brad: Ehhh… I see. Okay. I am going to play “I always know what… which old words serve my aims.”
Austin: Mm-hm. [overlapping] Which does…?
Brad: [overlapping] And tell him that my frien… Yes.
Floog’artha: My aging friend, what you are missing is purpose.
Austin: Oh, interesting!
Brad: [overlapping] This is what… This is what this Hammer was made for. [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] What is your… You’re trying to get him to… ?
Floog’artha: This is what your Hammer was made for.
Austin: This is really good.
Floog’artha: Let us… Let us take up your hammer and do what needs to be done.
Brad: [chuckles]
Austin: And his hand goes from, like, around the back of Hard's neck to, like, on the shoulder and gives it a soft squeeze.
Brad: [chuckles]
Erasure of the Bell-keeper: I…
Austin: …he says.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Erasure of the Bell-keeper: Ah. But be wary. You know not what the doors contain.
Alex: [overlapping] Uhh… And that…
Austin: [overlapping] And then seems to fade from existence.
Alex: [overlapping] Ah, crum! Dangit, how can I ask him?
Brad: [overlapping] All right. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Having been… Having been…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: It's gone now!
Brad: All right!
Alex: [overlapping] [in mock frustration] Aaahh!
Austin: [overlapping] It’s exorcism! Yeah.
Brad: Done and dusted. 
Austin: [overlapping] Uh… All right. Yeah. Done and dusted.
Brad: [overlapping] I guess we’ve got the Hammer now!
Austin: Yeah. As you leave the Bell-keeper's house and begin making your way, presumably, to the belltower… I think we all kind of get back together.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: You see Selex with… what can only be described as, like, a professional assassin pretending to be a pilgrim.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] A ninja in pilgrim’s clothing.
Vinny: Uh-huh.
Alex: Uh-huh. Not an uncommon sight. Got it.
Austin: Knife out as soon as… the two of you appear.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] She, like, draws her knife ready to jump on both of you.
Vinny: Selex is super proud still. [laughs] Like:
Selex: This…! This is my daughter!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: [chuckles]
Selex: This is… This is Zena! Zena, this is Floog’artha. This is Hard Markinson. These are my friends.
Zena: [overlapping] I’ll… I’ll…
Hard Markinson: [overlapping] Selex, you look like shit!
Zena: He almost died. He poisoned himself.
Vinny: [laughs] He’s like — kind of in tears — be, like:
Selex: I found her! Well, she found me.
Zena: Are we going to do something about that?
Austin: And she, like, nods at the ship that's crashing down into the ground destroying the ruins, killing the handful of remaining pilgrims. At this point, I think… you know, you see that, like… Ceria Blood… the Zealot has, like, tossed this sort of spear… Like, the spearhead has shot off and, like, locked into it — like a harpoon — and it has, like, a chain on it. And she's, like, riding the giant…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …like a Shadow of the Colossus boss.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] You know?
Alex: [overlapping] Trying to… Trying to…
Austin: [overlapping] She’s fighting the turtle up there…
Alex: Trying to break it.
Austin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like… Yeah. Trying to turn it into a mount, effectively. Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Exactly. Trying to break it like a horse. But it is still thrashing around and killing people. [overlapping] And… Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] So is it, like, still hovering over the ground? Or is it, like, kind of going up and then down up and then down?
Austin: It is… I think now it is kind of on a single, you know… because she's on it it's thrashing around kind of low to the ground.
Vinny: Hmm.
Austin: It's not… It's no longer doing its dive bombing act that it was doing before.
Alex: All right.
Brad: Can I… Can I ask… Are other players allowed to interact with someone else's Ephemera? [overlapping] In any way?
Austin: [overlapping] Only if that player, like, allows it, basically. The way it works is… Huh…! I'm trying to remember the exact rules around this. I think, generally speaking… the answer is yes. It keeps its uses.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: You can't just, like, hand it off to recharge its uses. Do you know what I mean?
Vinny: Mm-hm!
Brad: [overlapping] Right. Right.
Austin: [overlapping] Unless what's happened is… super narratively clear that it's, like, a big new turn for the thing. You know, like…
Brad: Right.
Austin: If Ganondorf stole the Master Sword, Ganondorf's version of the Master Sword would get three more uses. You know… When the ring slips from Gollum to Bilbo it gets three new uses. You know what I mean?
Brad: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: [overlapping] That is… it is… in that sense. But if Bilbo… When, you know… When Frodo… if Sam took it from Frodo, Sam doesn't just, like, [chuckles] get to recharge the ring and get a couple of extra bonus actions with it. You know?
Brad: Right.
Austin: That's the same party, effectively.
Brad: Um…
Austin: So, yeah.
Brad: Can I… Can I combo one of my Class Sentences with that Ephemera? Potentially?
Austin: Tell me what you want to do.
Brad: Um… My aim here is to have this fish thing struck with this Hammer which “always sounds a shattering peel”…
Austin: Yeah.
Brad: …when it hits something besides the bell. Um…
Austin: So what is your… How do you want to combine it with one of your Class Sentences?
Brad: My… My “blood for effect” Sentence I feel, like, could either…
Austin: Mm-hm…
Brad: …play on [chuckles] could allow Hard Markinson to live up to his name. [overlapping] [inaudible – 02:56:57]
Austin: [overlapping] You could… you could use “I always trade the blood of my enemies for effect unless the blood of a friend is required” by etching some sort of sigil in Hard's arm or… maybe his legs… I don't know. Hard, you tell me. Where does this, like, special blood sigil have to be etched that will let you temporarily leap into the air like the Incredible Hulk allowing you to maybe try to hit this thing with hammer?
Brad: That’s the goal.
Austin: [overlapping] Hard?
Alex: [overlapping] That sounds like it needs to go somewhere in the quad or calf area.
Austin: Yeah. I like that quite a bit. [overlapping] Maybe matching ones…
Alex: [overlapping] It’s a big leap. Definitely.
Austin: …you know, on both sides. What's the sigil look like that you have to do to… do this incantation or whatever?
Vinny: [chuckles] Mm-hm!
Austin: What's the sigil for giving Hard Markinson the super jump ability from Crackdown [chuckles]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: Um… It's, like, an anarchy symbol…
Vinny: Hmm!
Austin: Okay!
Brad: [overlapping] Like, I don’t know.
Austin: [overlapping] Hell yeah.
Alex: I like it.
Brad: [chuckles]
Austin: Yeah. It just matches perfectly with a number of other tattoos that are already down there?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] Sure. Yes.
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] You gotta find the right placement?
Brad: Yes.
Austin: Perfect. Then, yeah. You've done that. It's a +2… It's a +2. Nothing's trying to counter you on that. Which now gives Hard what he would need if you want to try to knock this thing out of the sky with the Hammer. You can attempt it.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. I think… I mean, I was already angling toward the idea of, like, looking at the hammer looking at the thing, looking at the hammer looking at the thing…
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: …trying to decide how to do it. So that saves me a little bit of that trouble.
Austin: I love it.
Alex: So… So I'm going to — with my new-found leg powers — do a full-on running sprint at this thing. When I get within what I consider to be leaping distance, I am going to basically do, like, a full-on squat. And I am just going, with the hammer in in hand, I am going to do — and I'm sorry for referencing this particular movie — the straight up, like, 300 fucking… giant slow motion hammer leap… right at this thing. And I am going to full-on, every ounce of strength in my body I have, swing it down on the framework of this ghost ship.
Austin: It echoes. It reverberates through the entire town. The buildings shake and… quake. Some of them, you know, paint flakes come off. A brick loosens. One of the pairs of glasses on one of the pilgrims shatters. But the fish remains.
Alex: [overlapping] Shit.
Austin: [overlapping] There is a new Sentence in town.
Vinny: Uh-oh!
Brad: Oh!
Austin: This is the… +3 Sentence “Once I am risen, as long as my hidden power source remains pristine, I am unstoppable.”
Brad: Hmm… [chuckles]
Vinny: +3!
Brad: Well…
Austin: [chuckles]
Brad: Well, shit.
Austin: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I'm putting down the Undead Orphan Vessel.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: So, cross out the Ephemera.
[03:00:00]
Austin: It can't be used…
Vinny: [gasps in shock]
Austin: …for its Means for the rest of the scene.
Brad: Whoa! Oh my god. [overlapping] Well, now we're screwed. [chuckles] Oops!
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. You could still…! No, you could still ring the bell with it!
Brad: [overlapping] Oohhh!
Austin: [overlapping] You can still use it.
Alex: [overlapping] You can’t use it as a weapon, though. Yea-yea-yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Oh…! Oh…
Austin: [overlapping] It can’t be used for that Sentence. Yes.
Brad: [overlapping] I thought we cannot use it. Got it. Got it.
Alex: Right.
Austin: [overlapping] Um…
Alex: [overlapping] Its one use as a weapon has been done, and it cannot be used again in this scene. Got it.
Austin: In this scene.
Brad: Got it.
Austin: That is right. Exactly. Exactly right. [overlapping] Um. Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Is there a way I could cash in my Token or something like that to boost what I have?
Austin: Not… Not retroactively!
Alex: [overlapping] Okay. Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] You can't now do it. Because you didn't… You were using it against… This is the value of the defender going second, [overlapping] is… you know the counter goes second.
Alex: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: They get all the information. This is, I will say, this is another place where I think home games might choose differently here.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] In fact, I was just talking to someone who's actually in the chat right now, Si Sweetman, who was a playtester. We talked about this the other night. I think in Si’s home game they've been running it where… the attacker, the actor gets to know the Sentence…
Vinny: Hm.
Austin: …before they decide the Token use. For me, the thing that just happened is part of why I like not getting to know the Sentence… You have to decide on the Token first, [overlapping] because sometimes you have a +3…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah. Makes sense.
Austin: …and you're, like: “Well, this is definitely going to work, right?” So… So, yeah. This… This power source remain… “as long as this power source remains pristine I am unstoppable.” Of course, if you could find the power source [overlapping] and break it, obviously that would change.
Vinny: [overlapping] Ohhh…! Can…
Alex: That's the question I had. So the word pristine gives me a particular nugget of information here. And I would assume that since this was a combined effort Flugan would have the same knowledge of the Sentence that I would?
Austin: Yeah. I think everybody in this moment sort of… You know, the way I think about this — without getting too far up my own ass.
Vinny: Hmm.
Austin: This is a game written as — I'm immediately all the way up my own ass — this is a game written by people inside of the world of Realis.
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] And they see the world of Realis a particular way. The Wordwrights believe that Realis works according to this sort of narrative logic.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: They don't necessarily believe that the people inside understand that everything is made up of these Sentences, but they do believe that everyone has a sort of intuitive sense… Do you know that stuff… You know in Yakuza when Kiryu sees someone do something sick…
Alex: [overlapping] Yes.
Austin: [overlapping] [chuckles] And he goes, like, “I get it.” Or whatever. And he learns how to do it. The Wordwrights believe that's what's happening. So, I think in this moment it's not that you would say the words: “Oh, the Undead Orphan Vessel has the Sentence ‘Once I am risen [overlapping] as long as my hidden power source remains pristine, I'm unstoppable.’”
Alex: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: But you know it in your heart: [overlapping] “Ahhh! If we could only fuck up that power source somehow…!”
Alex: [overlapping] We perceive it.
Austin: Exactly. Yes.
Vinny: Um… Two things here. Okay.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: One… [chuckles] so if I were to use a Bond with Hard…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: …does it need to beat that +3? Or it depends what we're doing?
Austin: Depends on what you're doing!
Vinny: [overlapping] Depends on what we’re doing. Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] Right? Like, the… The reason that this worked is that the Undead Orphan Vessel was specifically attacked in a way that was about trying to stop it.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Right? Um…
Alex: [overlapping] It’s “unstoppable.”
Austin: [overlapping] Narratively… And it's unstoppable. What it's… trying to do right now, primarily, is get the two riders that it has off its back. Which is you and Celia. You, Hard, and Celia. Um…
Alex: Oh. [overlapping] I'm still up there! Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] It would… I imagine so! Maybe not.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] If you want to be on the ground, you can be on the ground.
Alex: [overlapping] No! You know what, I like that.
Austin: [overlapping] You still have your superjump legs. Right? So I’m not gonna…
Alex: [overlapping] I like that.
Austin: [overlapping] Of course you could. But…
Vinny: [overlapping] But, yeah…
Austin: [overlapping] But… It won't necessarily use it against you. You know, I… There's a part in the book where I'm, like: “GMs, this is not a game about playing oppositionally. There are other good games about playing oppositionally. Go play DnD 4th Edition [overlapping] if you want to do a little tactical gameplay thing.”
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. [chuckles]
Austin: “Play with your players.” And I think, for me, that's a Sentence that comes up around trying to stop it. Or it continuing to exist into infinity. You know what I mean? Something like that. But I'm not going to use it to smash… That's not the Sentence it's using to, like, smash into things: it has a different Sentence for that, effectively. You know?
Vinny: So what I'd like to do, seeing this… I feel like Selex would know, he'd clock what's going on here about this… They always have a… There's a power source. Like, he knows ships. [overlapping] He knows engineering.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: And Hard is from the same place as me — [overlapping] but sometimes they don't act like they remember that.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: He would know. We've worked on ships like this before. We…
Austin: Oh…! Yeah!
Vinny: He would know that there is… there's a power source that is hidden inside some of these ships that can deflect, you know, blows like this.
Austin: Yeah. Totally.
Vinny: And… And so, I would be… Thinking about this Bond we have — like, he knows; and he knows Hard knows —
Alex: Mm-hm.
Vinny: …and he also knows Hard always knows the way to something. Hard…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: Hard always… Somehow, Hard always has the right directions… to find something.
Austin: Yeah. I love this. [overlapping] This is good.
Vinny: [overlapping] He believes in him.
Austin: Yeah. This is… “Hard is from the same place as me but they don't… they act like they don't remember that.”
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: Yeah… You did a job once where you were working on an Orphan Vessel like this… that was, like, a demolition job. You were sent out to, like, break down some sort of ship together. And nothing you… no matter what you did you couldn't get through this thing’s [overlapping] sort of, like…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yes!
Austin: …the shield of its soul, effectively. And you found out that the seventh rib left… actually contained its, like, eternal power source. And so if you could, like, break into that rib you could find the actual source of its power and destroy that. Or even just… you know, scuff it up! It really is… It needs to be pristine. [overlapping] Like… like…
Alex: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: Like you said. So, yeah. You're able to remind him of that.
Vinny: And I'm going to say… in that moment when we were on that ship maybe in the past Selex just kind of… they're from the same place but not from the same place. Like, he was kind of shocked Hard was… “How do you know this stuff, man? Like… where are you from?” [overlapping] Like…
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Right.
Vinny: You know? Like… “Man. Yeah. That's good, Hard!” [chuckles] Like: “I wouldn't have thought about that!” Like, he…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: We are… We're sympatico! We have a lot of this same stuff. But he didn't grow up with me. [overlapping] Like, it's not that same origin.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] You know…
Austin: [overlapping] I like it.
Alex: [overlapping] Back when Hard was having to fight with snake trains , he…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: …you know, he was looking for the power source on those things, too. So… He doesn't know why he remembers that. He just knows that he remembers that.
Austin: Yeah. All right. I think the… You know. To me, you're using that Sentence, Vinny, which means that Selex has communicated this to Hard. [overlapping] But Hard's still the one up there and has to go do it.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: Right.
Austin: Right?
Alex: [overlapping] And so…
Austin: [overlapping] So Hard, how do you execute on this plan?
Alex: So who am I up there with? It's one of the inquisitor's kids?
Austin: It's one of the inquisitor's kids: it's Celia. It's Celia…
Alex: Okay.
Austin: Not Celia. Ceria Blood. Ceria Blood, the Zealot.
Alex: Ceria Blood
Austin: Who always… Yeah. Who “always wields an unpredictable weapon,” her chain-spear.
Vinny: Unpredictable…
Austin: And she's, like, you know…
Ceria Blood: To the ground, foul beast!
Alex: Mm-hm.
Ceria Blood: I'll have your blood even if you have none left!
Alex: [overlapping] I think…
Austin: [overlapping] She's having the time of her life. Oh my god, what a good day she's having!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: Fantastic. I'm very annoyed about that while I'm up there. But I'm going to let that slide for the moment. And I'm going to just try to get her attention to say… you know… I guess what I would what I would communicate is that:
Hard Markinson: I know where the power source is! I just need a momentary stability to get to it! Can you wrestle it to the ground?
Austin: Oh, that's really fun. How are you going to convince her of that? Because I think it sounds like your intention is to get her to give you the opportunity. Right?
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: Do you have any… that could bring her on board in that way?
Alex: Um…
[pause]
Alex: I think what I would say to her… [overlapping] Let me think. Like…
Austin: [overlapping] Sorry, I'm looking for it Means here is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a Sentence. Or a…
Alex: Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: …or something else. [overlapping] You know?
Alex: [overlapping] No, it’s… That's what I'm looking at right now. So what I’m thinking…
Austin: [overlapping] Just to make sure it’s there.
Alex: So what I'm thinking is: since I know that The Inquisitor and these people know my ship…
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: I can to say them:
Hard Markinson: The Tinman is my ship. I know how this shit works! Get it down!
Austin: I love it. That is “I always pilot my Orphan Vessel ‘Tinman’ with great skill, as long as I'm sober,” showing the flexibility of the Sentence here: you don't need to be piloting it for that Sentence to be useful.
Vinny: [overlapping] Hmm.
Alex: [overlapping] For the knowledge to be there.
Austin: [overlapping] Your reputation precedes you. Yes. I… Are you sober right now?
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: Yes.
Brad: [overlapping] Hmm…
Alex: [overlapping] I'm about as sober as I have ever been in this moment.
Austin: [laughs] Perfect! I think, yeah. She says:
Ceria Blood: Markinson! Ah, you ride with me today!
Austin: And… you know, whips the back of the chain around the thing's sort of neck to give a little extra leverage. And she goes… She says:
Ceria Blood: Hold on tight!
Austin: And pulls back with everything she has, driving the head of the thing down into the… kind of coastline, crashing against… through the wooden docks…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: …and giving you just the second you need to get to… You're holding on with all your might.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: You're crawling from rib to rib. You get to the seventh rib and… are able to, like, break it open. And there is a sort of the marrow… the, like, gooey marrow — the pristine gooey marrow…
Alex: Right.
Austin: …is now available for you to, like, fuck up. 
Alex: [overlapping] So what I'm going to do…
Austin: [overlapping] What are you going to do in there?
Alex: Yeah. So what I'm going to do is, once I have torn that thing open, I'm going to reach into my pockets which were not scrubbed clean — because basically the top half of me is completely clean…
Vinny: [chuckles] [overlapping] The grime?
Alex: [overlapping] …from where the Scrubbing Bubbles were, but there's still some Grime kind of in and around, like, my legs and my pockets and stuff — and so what I pull out is the filthiest screwdriver you've ever seen in your life.
Austin: [laughs]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: A screwdriver that is somehow been… rust has taken hold in the minutes since I was last there.
Austin: Yeah.
Alex: And pull it out, and I just shove it straight into that marrow — dust, grime, rust, disease, whatever the fuck is in there —
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] …and just rub it up and down as much as possible.
Austin: The thing continues to shake and…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …and shiver and then, eventually, clatter to the ground in a pile of bones. Like a skeleton in… you know, an old movie…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …what-do-you-call-it movie… The Sinbad movies. What are those… [overlapping] Harryhausen?
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, Harryhausen? Yeah. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Is that right? Ray Harryhausen.
Vinny: [overlapping] Stop motion?
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. That style of… stop motion. Yeah. Exactly.
Alex: [overlapping] Love it.
Austin: [overlapping] the Harryhausen style. And… And, yeah. There's quiet finally here. For a moment. And… I think Ceria turns to look at you, Hard, as if, like…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: You know, the blood is, like, in her now. Right?
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] She's in her, like, berserker rage, almost. And then she, like, spits off the corpse — like in down into the abyss below — and she says… um…
Ceria Blood: You've earned reprieve from me. I'll tell my father to let you be.
Austin: Which I didn't intend to rhyme. [overlapping] But I guess she rhymes sometimes.
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Brad: [chuckles]
Austin: And, you know, reaches down and hefts up one of the big, like… one of the huge bones of this thing — maybe a fang or something…
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: …you know, puts a fang in a pocket — and then hefts up one of the big rib cage bones. The rib bones. And almost, like, arms around it behind her back, like, a staff or something. And begins to walk away. So that she can, you know, bring it back to camp and… turn it into a new axe or something — in, like, a Monster Hunter way.
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: And, yeah. And…
Brad: Okay.
Austin: It has come to a stop. There's quiet in the air — except, again, every 18 seconds
Thrumming: Round… Ruin… Rune… Run…
Austin: Over and over again. But you're free to move… you're able to move freely here.
Vinny: Can… Can I use a Moon Sentence to check on the fate of the people who were attacked by this thing?
Austin: Oh, yeah! Totally. Do you want to spend a Token to do that?
Vinny: No, I just want to… Can I just use one?
Austin: You have to spend a Token to use a Moon Sentence. Yeah.
Vinny: Oh, interesting.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: Oh, to use one or to write one?
Austin: Either way. Yeah. Totally.
Vinny: Okay. Um…
Austin: Again, a great place to hack if people…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …if home games want to just let moon Sentences be free to use whenever. It gets a little powerful…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah, yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] …because they can be so broad.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: But still fun. I mean… You can also just narrate a little bit here. Right? What's the thing that you are trying to… make true?
Vinny: So I want everybody… I would love for the people who were attacked to actually start getting back up…
Austin: [overlapping] Sure. Interesting.
Vinny: [overlapping] And seem okay… because “The Thrummer chosen pilgrims are always allowed to access the vessel.”
Austin: Oh, interesting! [overlapping] Fun.
Vinny: [overlapping] And they should not be attacked for accessing The Vessel. The… Thrummer.
Austin: Well, they were attacked! So, it would be more like something about this… prevents them from dying. ‘Cause they were attacked, right?
Vinny: They were, yeah! [overlapping] That's what I'm saying! But they should…
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: But they should be okay, because they're allowed to access the Vessel. [overlapping] Like, the act of… Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] I think then you should… you should spend a Token.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: That's a pretty big… [overlapping] That’s a pretty big narrative thing.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. That's pretty big. Yeah.
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: All right. Yeah. I’m… [overlapping] Yeah, I’m gonna…
Austin: [overlapping] if you don't want them… Okay now, wait a second! I'll let you…
Vinny: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: I'll let you… not spend a Token if you let me do a little narration here. If you give me the authorial pen [overlapping] on what getting back up looks like.
Alex: [overlapping] The keys to the car?
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: Can I… Okay. Oh, man! Could I… Could I spend the Token and… [chuckles] Okay. Could I explain something to you and you tell me if you would be okay with this?
Austin: Yeah. A hundred percent!
[pause]
Vinny: Could… Could we spend the Token and make it look like… Floog’artha is channeling the… the god…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: …to make these pilgrims rise? To be… to be healed? To impress the See?
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] To basically…
Austin: Yeah. To, like, clear your name, effectively. Or, like, get on their good side. [overlapping] Or more.
Vinny: [overlapping] Maybe… to give us some berth, too.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] To be, like…
Alex: Yeah.
Vinny: Like… “Hey…”
Alex: So we don't have to run screaming out of here?
Vinny: Yeah, like, who's… who's touched by, you know…
Austin: By the Immaterial One for real. [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. For real.
Austin: Yeah! I like this. Floog’artha, are you good with that?
Brad: [overlapping] Sure! Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Are you happy with being perceived to be the powerful source of resurrection?
[03:15:00]
Brad: Like, that probably infers some amount of influence on me. So sure.
Austin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. Spend your Token!
Vinny: [overlapping] Great.
Austin: [overlapping] As… I think, actually as you're, like, pretending to raise them up… you actually do feel what would have happened had you not stepped in. And… actually, it's easy for you to kind of counter what was going to happen… because it's, like… It's sort of, like, an amount of life was being poured into them to resurrect them…
Vinny: Hmm!
Austin: …from the ship, from the sound of the thrumming. But you… you kind of actually, like, put a… stop in the hose — the, like, the hose of life — before too much got into them. Because what was going to happen is they were going to lose their faces.
Vinny: [sighs]
Austin: And become… possessed by these ancient spirits that were here once. And you were able to, like… you know, put a — what do you call… not a cinch in, [overlapping] you know — a knot in the hose.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, a kink. Like the bend… Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] The kink… The kink in the hose. Exactly. Before the spirits could come down the sort of hose of souls into their bodies. And so they're able to just get back up, thankfully. Somehow… You know, they're scarred.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: You know, they might even be debilitated in some way long term. But they are alive again in a way that some of them should not have been. And they all turn to look at Floog’artha, who is now, you know, [chuckles] in the bell-tower above them.
Alex: [chuckles]
Vinny: [chuckles] Yeah! [overlapping] Yeah, yeah. Selex is going to be, like…
Austin: [overlapping] In the most… [inaudible — 03:16:25] pose. You know?
Selex: Floog’artha, you've done it again!
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: Because wasn't… Wasn't Floog’artha…
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] …the impression he gave was that they'd seen a miracle and, like, stuff had happened?
Austin: And was specifically the leader of your little group of three people. [overlapping] You know what I mean? So…
Vinny: [overlapping] Right. Yeah. Right.
Alex: Right.
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] I think everyone is impressed.
Vinny: [overlapping] And we work for Floog’artha, right? Like, we were…
Alex: Yeah.
Vinny: Yeah.
Vinny: So, Selex would be, like:
Selex: [chuckles] Praise Floog’artha! You've done it again!
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah, I think…
Austin: [overlapping] Now, I do think that he gave a different name than Floog’artha.
Vinny: [laughs]
Brad: [overlapping] True.
Austin: [overlapping] But I think The Inquisitor in this moment will just assume that this is some sort of…
Vinny: This is a… [overlapping] Yeah. Like, an honorary title.
Austin: [overlapping] …you know…
Brad: [overlapping] A title.
Alex: [overlapping] A title. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] [inaudible – 03:22:34]
Vinny: [overlapping] Yea-yea-yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. Right. The Floog’artha.
Brad: Floog’artha Eustace Fliprock to you.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Right! Yeah! Of course! Right. Eustace Fliprock. Of course. Thank you very much.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] A hundred percent.
Vinny: [overlapping] We mere mortals could never use that name! That's a… You know, you say that name, you incur the consequences.
Austin: [overlapping] A hundred percent.
Alex: [overlapping] I think a…
Brad: [overlapping] Was that… Was that my Token that burned for that?
Austin: I think Vinny… [overlapping] used it… which…
Vinny: [overlapping] No, no. I used mine! Sorry.
Brad: [overlapping] Oh, okay.
Vinny: [overlapping] I think.
Austin: [overlapping] It's a little… it's a little complicated because what Vinny was doing was using a Moon Sentence there.
Brad: [overlapping] He used a Moon Sentence. Right.
Austin: Yeah. So… And as long as you're good with that you can… someone else can spend it, and you can be part of that sort of action. You know?
Brad: Got it. Got it.
Austin: [overlapping] Okay.
Brad: [overlapping] And one… one other point of order, real quick: are those struck through abilities back on the table?
Austin: [overlapping] I think now, at this point, that feels like the end of a scene for me.
Brad: [overlapping] Was that the end of the scene? Or are those still off?
Vinny: [overlapping] Hmm!
Austin: [overlapping] So everything that struck should now be unstruck, as you…
Alex: [overlapping] Okay. Got it.
Austin: …as things come to a sort of calm… you know, beat — I wouldn't say resolution yet. There's still whatever's behind the drawbridge. But… You know.
Vinny: Even the Ephemera? Or that that is done?
Austin: Even the Ephemera!
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, wow! Okay.
Austin: [overlapping] That's the end of scene, I think. The scene was: can you get rid of the… the big Undead Orphan Vessel. So. Yeah.
Vinny: And then… For Selex's sheets does that “I always remind people of their origins” go back to… [overlapping] Do I get rid of “our shared”…?
Austin: [overlapping] That's should… No. That’s the end of a session.
Vinny: [overlapping] Session, not a Scene!
Austin: [overlapping] That stays Honed. For now.
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: Not a scene. Correct.
Vinny: But…
Austin: Yep.
Vinny: [overlapping] But “simple solutions”…? Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Important, because that means, like, for instance, you couldn't use that to someone who doesn't share your origin.
Vinny: [overlapping] Right. That’s what I… Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] The Inquisitor does not share your origin, you know, for instance.
Austin: [overlapping] All right.
Vinny: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: But, you know, “I always find an effective solution” works. And you get the berth you hoped for, here. I think The Inquisitor calls up to you and says:
Creighton Bile: I will escort back the pilgrims.
Vinny: Nice.
Creighton Bile: Take your time…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Creighton Bile: You seem able to handle yourselves fine!
Austin: [half in the same tone] “I also rhyme sometimes, apparently. It runs in the family.”
Vinny: [laughs]
Brad: [chuckles]
Austin: “It's a family thing.”
Vinny: Yeah.
Alex: Mm-hm. [overlapping] I guess…
Brad: [overlapping] Escort… back to the See station?
Austin: They're just… Yeah. They're going to get escorted back to…
Brad: [overlapping] Further out.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. The… What did I call it? The Retroquire. Which is a…
Brad: Right.
Austin: Yeah. It's, like, a station behind the… the place where singing is happening. Right? So… [chuckles]
Brad: Right.
Austin: The Retroquire. [overlapping] Quire, Q-U-I-R-E, but. Yeah.
Brad: [overlapping] So they're out, is what we… So they are out. They’re not… headed to the drawbridge. They’re just gone.
Austin: They're not headed for the drawbridge. They're just gone. I think you catch a few of them leaving with things that they found… aboard the vessel — giving you a little clue as to what was maybe really going on here.
Vinny: Hmm!
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: Which is: yeah, sure. One of them donated their wrench factory or whatever the fuck I said two hours ago.
Alex: I think that's what you said.
Austin: They're effective… Yeah. They're effectively paying the church to let them come grave-dig in this ancient ship. And they're leaving with stuff that's way more valuable than what they… tossed into the acid. Or what they donated to the church. So this is sort of, like, a… It's a pilgrimage, but really it's a way that the greatest supporters of the church are able to come cash in that influence, and go home with Ephemera of their own. Or, you know, relics of great of wealth and… you know, worth and power. Stuff like that. So. Yeah.
Vinny: Would they have assumed that we were of the same ilk?
Austin: A hundred percent.
Vinny: [overlapping] Okay. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Until now, at least. I think at this point The Inquisitor is, like: “Aha.” You know.
Alex: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] “I've heard, you know, Hard Markinson was identified.” But… you did just save a bunch of their most powerful and rich… you know, supporters’ lives. And did something that seemed kind of incredibly holy.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: And the Immaterial One works in mysterious ways! You know?
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Sometimes you just let it ride! There will be other opportunities to be an Inquisitor at you sometime in the future. You know?
Alex: [overlapping] Sure. 
Austin: [overlapping] Especially, if you do the Elmer Fudd-, Inspector Zenigata-style, like, recurring annoyance you know thorn in your side. 
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: There will be other times to… to get you. Is how he thinks.
Alex: [shouting] Hogan!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Exactly! Exactly that.
Vinny: [overlapping] So did the drawbridge close?
Alex: [overlapping] All right.
Brad: [overlapping] So we basically got free hand? I don’t know if we ever opened it yet.
Austin: [overlapping] Sorry, say that again? You've not opened it yet. That's correct.
Vinny: [overlapping] Sure.
Brad: [overlapping] So we basically got a free hand? We've basically got a free hand in here, now?
Austin: A hundred percent. [overlapping] You're alone in here as far as you can tell.
Brad: [overlapping] [inaudible – 03:21:18]
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] Outside of…
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. All right.
Alex: [overlapping] Is Zena is still with us?
Austin: Yeah. Zena is still with you. I think.
Alex: Okay.
Austin: I guess that's a choice that, you know… I think she says… Um…
Zena: I failed my mission. I should go. Good luck to you all in here.
Vinny: [overlapping] [chuckles] Wait! Wait. No, wait, wait.
Austin: [overlapping] and it's, like, just going to turn and walk out of your life.
Brad: [overlapping] All right.
Vinny: [overlapping] Selex is definitely, like:
Selex: No, no, no!
Vinny: Like, runs after…
Selex: You can't go.
Zena: [chuckles] I've already… put myself in enough hot water, Selex.
Austin: [overlapping] She’s using your full name.
Selex: [overlapping] Come with us!
Zena: Come with you? My life is with the Guild.
Selex: Come with… Just take a break from The Guild for… for a little bit. Come with… Spend the rest of the… our time here together.
Vinny: And he coughs. [chuckles] ‘Cause the Poison's still…
Austin: [chuckles]
Vinny: …you know… [laughs]
Austin: Yeah. It’s still deep in there.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. [chuckles]
Austin: [overlapping] You developed the classic anime dad cough.
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: You're slowly dying for the rest of the show. Uh-huh.
Vinny: Yeah. Just speckles of blood fl… [coughs] Yeah.
Austin: Do you have a Sentence you're using? Do you have a Means to use here?
Vinny: Um…
Austin: I think you do. [overlapping] But, you know. I’m curious.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. I mean I could always use the “I remind those in positions of power of or shared origins.”
Austin: [overlapping] I don’t know if that she’s still in a position of power, anymore, ironically!
Vinny: [overlapping] If she’s still in a position of power…! Yeah. Yeah.
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] You've disempowered her in a pretty big way!
Vinny: Um… Let's see. Let's see what would I use… Okay. I use… [clears troat] I would try and use “I always find a simple but effective solution” to be, like:
Selex: Look, you can go back to your life for the rest of your life. With these hours — just give them to us. For now. While we're here.
Vinny: It's a simple but effective solution to the problem.
[pause]
Austin: +1: “I always find a well-paying job from The Guild.” I counter it.
Vinny: Oh.
Zena: I'm sorry. I wish things had been different between us. I'm glad you're alive.
Vinny: [whispering] I burn my Dream!
Austin: Ho…! [chuckles]
Vinny: This is… This is it!
Austin: [overlapping] This is the dream!
Vinny: [overlapping] This is the dream!
Austin: Yeah. She turns to go.
Vinny: [coughs]
Austin: She's, like, steps onto the wooden walkway. You know? Um. You can feel her… like, literally, as the light in here… begins to… Which, by the way, we didn't even talk about where the light in here is coming from! I guess there's giant lights hanging from above. There's, like, a… Oh! You know what it is? There are these… The etched circles — this kind of runic… the round circle that, like, the face is — it's just a single, almost… a giant chalk outline and each of those glows and emanates a sort of light above to light this place up. There's, like, five of them, giant, above you. But there are shadows everywhere here. And you can see that she's starting to fade back into shadow to disappear. [overlapping] She is using “I always disappear into the dark.”
Vinny: [overlapping] Hmmm!
Austin: You're countering it with your Dream. What do you do? What is the… [overlapping] What is your final appeal here?
Vinny: [overlapping] I go:
Selex: If you're going to leave you might as well take that knife back out and kill me right here.
Austin: [sighs] And… you know, the shadow passes over her, you know, like… it goes away. She disappears for a second. And then when the light comes back and, like, kind of waves back in she's turned around and walking back towards you on the bridge. You know… And she, like, you know, says:
Zena: [sighs] Fine. Let's open that door.
Vinny: And he goes to, like… he wants to give her a hug…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: But it… He… moves a little… And then just gives a nod. And, like…
Austin: [sighs] [overlapping] Yep. Yep.
Vinny: [overlapping] Doesn't touch her. Like…
Austin: [overlapping] It takes a little time to become…
Vinny: [overlapping] He's just happy to be here. Yeah.
Austin: …the family-family.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: That’s right.
Austin: All right. Time to ring the bell, question mark?
Vinny: Oh, man. [overlapping] Ring the bell.
Brad: [overlapping] Sure.
Austin: All right. Climb the tower. You know, the tower has this perfect view: on one side is the giant aperture facing outwards into space; the other way is the huge drawbridge. Hard, are you ringing the bell?
Alex: I mean, I got the hammer.
Austin: [overlapping] You’ve the hammer.
Alex: [overlapping] I'm more than happy to be the ringer of the bell.
Austin: Yeah. As you do, you can feel the spirit of the… the Bell-keeper kind of around you — you know, big, literal ghostly arms, you know, around your arm. You know like a…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …fucking Elden Ring boss [overlapping] that has, like, the spirit version of themselves around them.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: And you hit the bell, and it goes [imitates a long low ringing] BWAAAww-wowowow…
Vinny: And, like, as he's, like, slow motion hitting the bell and the stuff is happening…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: …Selex is just looking up at, like, his daughter [overlapping] who's, like, staring in the distance.
Austin: [overlapping] Uh-huh.
Vinny: Just, like…
Austin: Yeah.
Vinny: …so happy!
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. I love it!
Vinny: [overlapping] Framed by the light that's coming in here, as the bell is reverberating on…
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] In this light… at this point… yeah. And then… You know, she's framed by the wooden… the giant wooden bridge…
Vinny: Yes.
Austin: …which begins to lower. And you see… You see a few things. [chuckles] First, the most beautiful sky you've ever seen. Somehow in this ship there is a valley. The sky is… lavender and violet. There is sunlight passing through soft clouds. Wisteria grows from the hills and the mountains. In the distance you see a formation of knights on horseback, chanting. And they are chanting what you've been hearing. All of them. All of their voices becoming one here:
Thrumming: Round. Ruin. Rune. Run. Round. Ruin. Rune. Run.
Austin: And then you see something else! Huge. Moving through the valley, climbing up the mountains, a vast worm. Uh. One of the Worms of the Blister — a sort of mythical creature that can devour anything that it approaches. Except this one's bigger than the ones you've read about. It's somehow as big as the ship itself. And you opened the door. It moves towards the drawbridge. [chuckles] and it looks — its eyes hungry — out the aperture onto the galaxy of Moons beyond. And… I think, you know, somewhere around here maybe, Floog’artha you've pieced together what this place is: this is sort of the vacuum cleaner of space.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] Great.
Austin: [overlapping] Whatever this ancient civilization was… used to deploy this… this ship when it was time to eradicate a Moon. You know, I think maybe there's the sort of clay tablet we described in the little booth that's up here — and it's, like, showing a simple, you know… stick figure hieroglyphic animation of what happens when the bell is rung. The bell is rung so that you can so that a moon can be destroyed and a new moon made in its place. These were, like, moon makers.
Vinny: [overlapping] [whispering] Oh, wow…!
Austin: [overlapping] These were people who had such mastery over words and language that they could bring new things into being through the creation, the drawing of certain runes of power. And when it was time to make more space for another moon, first you had to get rid of one of the established thousand. And so, you let the Worm out. You let out this… this creature. This isn't even the full one! This is a nascent one. This is… you know… if we were going to keep going here I would I would add “The Nascent Ruinworm”… [chuckles]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: …to the Sentence. In fact, I think, actually, I will at least add this one Sentence to it. Because as it's coming towards you, you can see that, like, the Wisteria all through the valley is lifted up — and, like, re-joins the body of the worm. And it keeps growing bigger and bigger and bigger. It has the Sentence “When the Grand Bell tolls, I always reconstitute my body.” And so, these wormkeepers, these Rune wormkeepers are serving their duty: they're keeping the valley ready because the valley itself re-becomes the Worm. And it's headed towards you. It's headed towards the now open drawbridge and to the… system of moons. Hoping — eager — to get its first meal in thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And this is where we'll end for the day.
Brad: [chuckles]
Vinny: Can I… Can I add one last scene before we go? Can we do that?
Austin: [overlapping] Oh, please!
Vinny: Selex does that, like, weird inset shot jittery… pinky touches his daughter's hand…
Austin: [overlapping] Uh-huh! [chuckles] Yes!
Vinny: [overlapping] …as they, like, see the Worm coming. And the daughter, like, grasps his hand back.
Austin: Yeah. [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] And then then just cut to black.
Austin: Cut to black.
End of the story [03:29:59]
[03:30:00]
[pause]
Austin: That's Realis!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: You hear…
Brad: All right!
Alex: After it cuts to black you hear the sound of the hammer clanking to the floor.
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: [chuckles] Yeah. Good. Yeah. And the sound of, like [imitates the shattering sound] start shaking!
Alex: Yup.
Austin: Because the Sentence… the hammer works again!
Vinny: Yeah! [overlapping] Yeah, yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] So…
Vinny: [overlapping] So it just broke the bridge?
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Who knows! Yeah. We'll see. [overlapping] All right.
Alex: [overlapping] It was a gentle clang.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh! That was awesome!
Austin: Thank you, guys. Okay, yeah. Very gentle, very careful… you're trying not to sound a… whatever peel… a shattering peel.
Alex: No! No.
Brad: [overlapping] I… Can I tell you…
Austin: [overlapping] So, that's Realis! Yeah.
Brad: Can tell you… Can I tell you I was feverishly looking at everything I have?
Austin: [laughs]
Brad: Trying to figure out a way to betray all of you and take control of that Worm? [chuckles] 
Vinny: [laughs]
Austin: I mean, I think that's… I think if we had another two hours…
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: …that's the session we would have to play out. You know?
Alex: Hundred percent.
Austin: Unfortunately, we are 10 minutes from our stop-time.
Vinny: Yeah. [overlapping] That’s a perfect ending spot.
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah…
Austin: [overlapping] We had an hour-long window of stop-time…! So.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: I didn't want to kick us in [overlapping] to only let people down.
Vinny: [overlapping] No… it was perfect!
Brad: I was… I was all… I was all ready to become the thousandth Moon. Right?
Vinny: [laughs]
Alex: [laughs]
Austin: [sighs] I mean, this is it! Right, yeah. We get the shot of the glistening of power in your eye…!
Brad: [overlapping] Mm-hm. Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Like: “Oh…!”
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: You couldn’t have imagined it was a…
Vinny: [overlapping] Right.
Austin: [overlapping] …what a gift you were given. You know?
Brad: [overlapping] You don’t even…
Vinny: [overlapping] Like, everybody is… Everybody's horr… [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] I mean…
Vinny: [overlapping] Everybody's horrified except for… his a smile.
Austin: [overlapping] Grin? [chuckles] Yeah.
Brad: The ability to… The ability to create and destroy Moons is the most JRPG-ass ability…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [overlapping] Hell yeah!
Austin: [overlapping] A hundred percent!
Brad: [overlapping] …ability you could imagine.
Austin: Yeah. Yeah! in a way it's sort of… you know. Please, people at home run with this! We've just set up a really fun campaign, which is, like… this is the origin of the great villain…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: The… you know…
Vinny: [overlapping] Mm-hm!
Austin: [overlapping] …the Charioteer of the Ruinworm. Who is… Who is destroying Moons. You know? Figure out how to stop Brad. [chuckles]
Vinny: [chuckles]
Alex: [laughs]
Vinny: Floog’artha the Great… that people now, like, revere, right?
Austin: [sighs]
Vinny: Because, like, those pilgrims [overlapping] will spread the word…
Austin: [overlapping] Right!
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Brad: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: Spread the word! Yes.
Vinny: Yeah. You're a saint now, effectively, to them. Right?
Brad: Yeah.
Austin: Oh, it's good! Juicy!
Alex: Listen! Cults have gotten started with less!
Brad: [overlapping] True!
Austin: [overlapping] Easy! Easily. Yeah… That is…
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah, that's amazing! Like, in…
Brad: [overlapping] That was fun!
Vinny: I'm so glad we had you to run us through it.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [overlapping] because in practice everything just makes so much more sense.
Austin: [overlapping] I… Yeah. It is…
Vinny: [overlapping] Not that it was, like, too obscure! But, like, just using it and…
Alex: In practice it makes so much more sense.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: It's such a funny game because… Yeah. I… You know. Every time I sit down — when I was doing, like, my revisions for this version of the game — I was, like: “Ughh, I got to… I got to trim from the rules. I got to… There's too many rules. It's, like, 40 pages of rules or something. It's not that complicated!”
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: But it is that complicated. It's just that once you know the rules it moves pretty quickly. You know?
Alex: Right.
Austin: And, you know, just as a — again, as a quick, you know, illustration — if we were now ending the session we would be marking some Sentences…
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Austin: [overlapping] Again, you could mark a Sentence if you worked towards achieving your Dream. Vinny, you could definitely do that!
Vinny: Uh-huh.
Austin: I generally give the advice that players should be really generous with themselves there. You know, you don't have to have, like, achieved a big thing. Like, Floog’artha should definitely mark that… a Sentence for that.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Because… you know, even if you didn't achieve your goal here you can see it really clearly. [overlapping] And then you’d…
Vinny: [overlapping] Even if my Dream were gone? Do I still mark it?
Austin: [overlapping] Even if you succeeded it…
Vinny: [overlapping] Okay.
Austin: I believe, yeah. As long as you're working towards it…
Vinny: Okay.
Austin: …you still get to mark it. Because even if you spent your Dream it doesn't mean you've given up your Dream.
Vinny: Mm-hm.
Austin: It just Means you don't have that extra gas in the tank that you might need to achieve it when push comes to shove… You mark another Sentence based on how you played, but that one that you didn't mark while playing. You'd write down to make sure that you have your — if you're playing in person especially — “Hey, I have my Token.” you write that down on your sheet: “I have my Token right now.” Because if you had a physical Token that… it doesn't tell you. Right?
Alex: Mm-hm.
Austin: And then you make sure everything you was marked right. You review your Bonds, your Dreams, your Band Sentences, and that's the end of session. And that's Realis. That's how it goes.
Alex: [overlapping] Love it.
Vinny: [overlapping] That's great.
Brad: [overlapping] Pretty cool. Pretty cool. It was fun.
Austin: [overlapping] Thank you so much.
Vinny: Thank you! Yeah, it's awesome. So, Austin before we go… Do the pitch again!
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Where can people folks find it and and listen to it and check it out?
Austin: Absolutely! You can find Realis at thecalcutech.itch.io or at possible hyphen worlds hyphen games.itch.io. Just go to itch.io and search for Realis. I think you might even be able to just do a Google search or a… or a Duck Duck Go search for Realis at this point — R-e-a-l-i-s — and find it. I just did a search on my computer and I am now beating Realis, the cryptocurrency mobile game…
[others chuckle]
Austin: …on blockchain…
Vinny: [overlapping] Great.
Austin: [overlapping] …that released the same day as my game!
Brad: [overlapping] Nice!
Vinny: [overlapping] Whaaat?
Alex: [overlapping] Now what?
Austin: [overlapping] Cursed! Cursed! I was so upset!
Vinny: [overlapping] That's really messed up!
Austin: [overlapping] I was so upset. There's obviously no relation and they couldn't have known, you know. But really bad luck on my… for me. But it turns out I'm beating them in SEO. So…
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Fuck ‘em.
Alex: Good.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: And then, yeah. You can go there. It's 15 bucks to get this Ashcan Edition. There will be a couple of small typo changes and stuff like that. I'm going to add bookmarks to it. But it'll be kind of… that's that version of the book. And then there'll be a bigger, even better version of the book later this year that you should be able to — or I guess maybe early next year — that you'll be able to pre-order. We're aiming for pre-orders early next year with… physical copies and stuff by mid next year. That's the… the dream. That's my…
Vinny: [overlapping] That’s your Dream! Don’t give up on that Dream!
Austin: [overlapping] The Dream I'm trying to hold on to. Yes. And I'll say, you know: even this is an early edition of the game, it is a pretty… it is a pretty pretty hearty book. It is a pretty filled book. There are 20 classes; there are 40 NPCs of the type that you saw me use — things like the Zealot and The Inquisitor are in there —; there are three grand Factions… I don't think the Venerant See or The Rune are in there so that's a little preview of what's to come. There are three example Moons… There's actually a fourth one that's kind of hidden throughout the game that you could build yourself if you find all the hidden Sentences. And it's, like, 125 Pages. There's a bunch of cool art in there. In fact, Vinny, yeah. If you go to page 22 you can see Sam Beck's version of the Valley we were just describing! With the Rune.
Vinny: [overlapping] Oh, wow!
Austin: [overlapping] There they are with their faces removed.
Alex: [overlapping] Oh, wow.
Austin: [overlapping] These cool ancient knights with the wisteria coming up the columns.
Brad: [overlapping] Oh, the horses!
Vinny: [chuckles]
Brad: [overlapping] The horses also lack faces! 
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah the horses… Aren't the horses so sick? Yeah…!
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Those are good!
Alex: [overlapping] Those are fucking sick, man!
Austin: Yeah. Sam Beck crushed this art. I'm so glad more people are getting to see it. Um. Yeah. So that is… That is Realis. Thank you so much for having me, hosting me to play.
Vinny: [overlapping] Of course!
Alex: [overlapping] It was a delight, man!
Brad: [overlapping] No, thank you!
Austin: [overlapping] You know, we didn't have any snake trains, but we did get an undead ship… fish-ship — which I think is a sort of elevation or… evolution of the old snake train. So…
Vinny: Definitely.
Alex: Yeah.
Austin: Mission accomplished.
Vinny: And Brad, what did you think?
Brad: [overlapping] It was fun.
Vinny: [overlapping] You said before you haven't played a lot of tabletop stuff!
Brad: Yeah. [overlapping] I mean this, like…
Vinny: [overlapping] I thought you did great!
Brad: Thank you. I like how linguistic this is — you know, like, as a lit major, having mechanics be extremely open to interpretation,, you know… and double meanings and stuff like that. It gets really fun. [overlapping] And you can kind of bend things to your purposes.
Austin: [overlapping] It's so fun. And it… A hundred percent. I think that's, for me, a big part of the joy. I… You know, part of… one of the main inspirations, I said before, was Berserk: the way that the characters, they start really big and blocky and bold and then they change and become more nuanced.
Another huge influence was Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolf, which I did a book podcast… I'm doing a book podcast now with Michael Lutz and Cameron Kunzelman from Ranged Touch called Shelved by Genre. We went through the Book of the New Sun books, and that is a series that plays with truth and language a lot. It's sort of a post-apocalyptic science fantasy series about a torturer with perfect memory who may or may not also be holy, depending on your perspective.
And huge… The parts of that… are like Borges stories or… there's a lot that's kind of like… You have the information but there's something missing. There's something hidden. Or, you have the truth but there's a side to it — not just narratively or plot-wise, but in terms of, like, how the world works that you haven't quite thought about yet. And that was a huge influence. And so, yeah. Literature: super high on the list of inspirations for this game. 
Along with, like… I was just telling somebody else… stuff that is truly “I am the only person I know who deeply cares about it” — or one of four people —, like Reign: The Conqueror, the anime about sci-fi Alexander the Great.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: Huge influence on this game! Don't expect anybody else to notice that at all.
Alex: [laughs]
Austin: Because who else watched that at all. So, yeah. That's Realis. Thanks for having me!
Vinny: Thank you!
Brad: [overlapping] Yeah. Thank you!
Vinny: [overlapping] And thank you, Brad! Thank you, Alex!
Alex: Mm-hm.
Vinny: Thanks everybody for tuning in and watching! And for supporting Austin go check out Realis and… throw your support in there. [overlapping] Support new and creative endeavors.
Austin: [overlapping] Yeah. And if you want to hear more of it you can go to Friends at the Table.net and friendsatthetable.cash to hear more Realis. There's a… I will tell you, the soundtrack to that has been incredible. Jack De Quidt is a sick soundtrack. And I will tell you one of the names of the songs on that soundtrack is “Pig Magic”.
Vinny: [chuckles]
Austin: And you'll have to go listen to the podcast to learn why there is a song called “Pig Magic”.
Vinny: Okay! I'll… I'll always check out Pig Magic. [chuckles]
Austin: Always check out Pig Magic.
Vinny: [overlapping] That’s… That’s my…
Austin: [overlapping] Yes. Thank you. Thank for using the proper… Yeah.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: [overlapping] Mm-hm.
Vinny: [overlapping] Vinny always checks out…
Austin: [overlapping] That’s a +1 Sentence, because it was originally “Vinny always checks out magic”.
Vinny: Yeah.
Austin: And then you Realized it to be “Vinny always checks out [overlapping] Pig Magic.”
Vinny: [overlapping] Pig Magic. Yeah, yeah.
Alex: Mm-hm.
Vinny: All right, thanks everybody! Have a great weekend… and enjoy yourselves out there! And go get into your own collaborative storytelling…
Alex: [overlapping] Hell yeah.
Austin: [overlapping] Do it.
Vinny: [overlapping] Yeah. Yeah. Support each other! All right, everybody! Take it easy! Bye!
[“Realis” by Jack de Quidt plays to conclusion]
[episode ends]